A brother-in-law of disgraced former President Chun Doo-hwan will stand trial on tax evasion charges, state prosecutors said Friday.

Lee Chang-seok was indicted on a charge of evading taxes worth 6 billion won (US$5.4 million) and formally detained pending trial, they said.

He is the first relative of the former president ever to stand trial since prosecutors restarted efforts to reclaim hidden assets of the former military dictator who was convicted of taking bribes while in office in the 1980s.

Chun was ordered by the nation's top court in 1997 to return to state coffers around 220 billion won he illegally accumulated through bribery from big businesses during his military rule from 1980 to 1988. Chun, who seized power through a coup, has yet to return some 167.2 billion won to the state.

Lee, the younger brother of former first lady Lee Soon-ja, is suspected of having evaded transfer income taxes worth 6 billion won in the process of selling 28 lots of land that he owned in Osan, just south of Seoul, to a real estate developer in 2006. He falsely reported the sales price to the tax authority to evade the tax, according to prosecutors.

Prosecutors, however, said further investigation is needed to indict him on additional charges of corporate tax evasion.

They suspect Lee evaded the 5.9 billion won worth of corporate taxes in a transaction in 2006, in which he sold his land in Osan, just south of Seoul, to Chun's second son, Jae-yong, at a below-market price.

The move is expected to cause a delay in taking legal measures against the younger Chun who was questioned by prosecutors early this week as a suspect in Lee's case.

As the ex-president's family has provisionally agreed to pay the unpaid fines, prosecutors are also expected to control the pace of the ongoing probe for the time being. (Yonhap News)