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For days, the office of the incoming President Park Geun-hye had warned Mr. Lee not to "abuse his presidential power" by granting presidential pardons in his last days in office. Doing so, it said, would "go against the will of the people."

In ignoring that appeal, Mr. Lee asserted on Tuesday that he was still the president.

"This is not an abuse of presidential authority," Mr. Lee was quoted as saying by his office during a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, adding that the number of people pardoned under his five-year rule — 13,000 — was far smaller than those who had won presidential clemency under his predecessors. "It is carried out according to law and procedure," he added.

The highly unusual row between Mr. Lee and Ms. Park, both members of the governing Saenuri Party, rekindled a long-running controversy over a South Korean president's power to grant special amnesty.

In recent decades, every South Korean president has exercised that power more than once a year, freeing inmates or restoring the civil rights of ex-convicts, such as letting them run for political office. Such pardons were typically given ahead of national holidays, such as the Lunar New Year's Day, which falls on Feb. 10 this year, and affected as many as thousands of people at a time.

But those who traditionally have benefited also included several politicians, big businessmen and close associates of the president, some of whom had been convicted in high-profile corruption cases. That spawned a persistent complaint from civic groups and ordinary citizens that in South Korea that the corrupt yet politically connected escaped legal justice, helping foster persistent corruption among the country's political and business elite.

South Korean presidents, during their campaigns, had often warned that those convicted of corruption should not expect special pardons. But once elected, they invariably issued a special amnesty toward the end of their single five-year term, leading the political opposition to accuse them of giving their last favor to their allies before they left office.

Mr. Lee, who will hand over the presidency to Ms. Park on Feb. 25, continued that pattern when he approved special pardons for 55 people on Tuesday.

Although that was a modest number, it included Mr. Lee's longtime friend, the businessman Chun Shin-il and his close political ally and former Cabinet member Choi See-joong. Both of them were convicted of bribery and have finished less than half of their prison terms.

The amnesty also erased the criminal records of two other allies of Mr. Lee who were convicted of bribery but avoided prison terms: Park Hee-tae, a former National Assembly speaker, and Kim Hyo-jae, a former senior political affairs aide to Mr. Lee.

Ms. Park, like her predecessors, had, during her campaign, expressed concerns about the tendency of outgoing residents to grant special pardons, and those concerns were echoed Tuesday by her aides.

"Pushing ahead with pardoning those involved in irregularities and corruption will receive a national reproach," her spokesman, Yoon Chang-jung, said on Tuesday after the presidential pardons were announced. "President Lee should bear all responsibility."

The main opposition Democratic United Party raised suspicions that Ms. Park's criticism of Mr. Lee was insincere and was a political gambit aimed at shielding her from the public backlash over the controversial pardons. In fact, several other politicians pardoned on Tuesday included a close ally of Ms. Park.

"We are appalled by the brazen arrogance, self-righteousness and lack of communication that President Lee is demonstrating till his last day in office," the party's spokesman, Jung Sung-ho, said in a statement. "President-elect Park Geun-hye should be held responsible too for doing nothing to stop the pardons except uttering a few words of criticism."