Brian McDonald
Seoul — The chairman of South Korea’s SK Group was ordered by a court on Thursday to pay his wife $1 billion in cash, in the country’s largest divorce settlement.
The Seoul High Court ordered Chey Tae-won to pay Roh So-young, daughter of former President Roh Tae-woo, 1.38 billion won, or just over a billion dollars, as a settlement, court documents showed provided to AFP.
The amount represented a significant increase from a previous lower court ruling of 66.5 billion won and takes into account the contributions that Roh So-young and his father made to Chey’s success.
Kiyoshi Ota/Bloomberg via Getty
SK Group runs businesses that include South Korea’s top mobile phone operator and also controls SK Hynix, the world’s second-largest memory chip maker.
“It was reasonable to decide that, as his wife, Roh played a role in increasing the value of the SK Group and Chey’s business activity,” the court said in a ruling obtained by AFP.
Chey married Roh So-young in 1988, but they have been separated for years. She appealed the original settlement amount awarded in 2022, several years after Chey filed for divorce in what became a bitter case.
The court said the new agreement also took into account the emotional distress Roh So-young suffered due to Chey’s extramarital affair.
Chey has a son with his new partner.
The court said Chey “shows no signs of remorse for his filthy behavior during the trial…nor respect for monogamy,” ordering him to pay the settlement in cash.
Chey’s net wealth was valued by the court at around four trillion won, meaning Roh So-young will get 35% of it in the settlement.
His legal team said it would appeal the latest ruling, claiming the court “found Roh’s unilateral claim to be factual.”
The Seoul High Court said Roh Tae-woo also helped Chey’s business flourish during his five years as president starting in 1988 by easing regulatory hurdles for the late former SK president Chey Jong-hyon, Sr. by Chey Tae-won.
“Former President Roh Tae-woo played the role of a protective shield for former President Chey Jong-hyon” when the late businessman tried to enter the mobile phone operator business, the court said, giving “intangible help” to the family .
Chey’s lawyers disagreed, saying the SK Group had been under pressure from the Roh government and “provided various financial contributions.”
“We will clarify things through the appeal,” they said.
A former general, Roh Tae-woo was elected to the presidency in the 1987 elections, which were South Korea’s first free and fair elections in more than a decade.
He had previously helped his friend from the military academy, Chun Doo-hwan, stage a military coup and take over as dictator.
Roh Tae-woo is less reviled than Chun, in part for the economic growth he oversaw and his diplomatic outreach to the former communist bloc, which saw Seoul establish relations with Moscow and Beijing.
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