South Korea’s prime minister has backed calls for Samsung’s leader Lee Jae-yong to return to managing the global tech group weeks after being released from prison, despite laws banning convicted tycoons from returning to work for five years.

The billionaire head of Samsung’s founding Lee family, which controls the world’s biggest producer of computer chips, smartphones and electronic displays, was released on parole after serving 19 months of his two-and-a-half-year sentence for bribing former president Park Geun-hye.

Kim Boo-kyum, South Korea’s prime minister, told the Financial Times that the public believed Lee’s leadership was required to steer the country’s biggest and most important company through intensifying global competition and the economic challenges wrought by the Covid-19 pandemic.