Photo: Chey Tae-won. Credit: Seoul Chamber of Commerce.
In the largest divorce judgment in South Korean history, the Seoul High Court 서울고등법원 ruled on May 30 that Chey Tae-won 최태원, the 63 year-old owner of the SK Group, must pay nearly KRW 1.4t (USD 1.0b) to his ex-wife Roh So-yeong 노소영, an art curator and daughter of former president Roh Tae-woo 노태우. But the staggering size of the judgment was just one of many shocking revelations about Chey’s personal life and the secrets of South Korea’s second-largest chaebol 재벌 group.
Chey married Roh in 1988, and demanded divorce in 2017 after it was revealed that he had an out-of-wedlock child with a Korean American woman 15 years younger than him. Roh contested the divorce by demanding approximately 43% of the shares in SK Group that Chey owned, arguing that the shares constituted marital property. Chey prevailed in court in 2022, when the Seoul Family Court 서울가정법원 found that Roh had not contributed to the formation of most of Chey’s wealth, which Chey argued that he inherited from his father.
But Roh prevailed dramatically on appeal by producing the ultimate trump card: handwritten notes from 1988 and 1989 written by her mother, former First Lady Kim Ok-suk 김옥숙, detailing the use of the former president’s slush fund. Based on the notes, which had never previously been disclosed, Roh made the case that a significant portion of Chey’s wealth came from KRW 30b (USD 22m) that her father had siphoned off for the SK Group in 1991. The 200-page appellate opinion, which found in Roh’s favor, reportedly reads like a history of the Roh Tae-woo administration and its relationship with South Korean conglomerates.
