Yet another chaebol family feud has ignited over the succession of Korea’s eighth largest business conglomerate, Lotte Group. Daily reports of nasty family rivalries among the group founder father and his two sons bring back memories of Hyundai and Doosan Group’s disastrous round of family feuds a decade ago.
Since its establishment in 1940s, the governance structure of Lotte Group, consisting of 400 or more cross-shareholding units, has enabled the owner family to maintain control of this Korean-Japanese retail giant with only around 2% equity stake. The opaque ownership structure of the group’s holding entity Lotte Holdings, which is unlisted and based in Japan, has ultimately led to the succession battle. The battle started earlier this year when the founder Shing Kyuk Ho held an emergency board meeting attempting to fire his younger son Shin Dong Bin and name his older son Shin Dong Ju to succeed him. A few months later, Shin Dong Bin held a separate board meeting and proposed to fire all the holding company’s directors including Shin Dong Ju stating his brother has tricked his father to succeed to his father’s throne by taking advantage of his father’s mental illness with possible Alzheimer’s disease.
While the Financial Supervisory Service (“FSS”) and the Fair Trade Commission (“FTC”) have been seeking details on ownership structure and audit data of Lotte affiliates that are involved in the web of cross-holdings, still not much is known. In the Korean public view, the regulators’ vigorous demands to bolster corporate transparency by improving governance structure seem rather futile.
In this regard, Korea’s ruling party Saenuri and the FTC held a meeting, on August 6, to examine the Fair Trade Law in an effort to seek measures to reduce existing cross-shareholdings of Lotte Group. Currently, the Fair Trade Law, revised in 2013, to prohibit cross-shareholding arrangement is not applicable to existing cross-shareholding structures. Subsequently, a bill expanding domestic regulations on conglomerates to their overseas businesses was proposed.
For now, Shin Dong Bin appeared to have seized a chance of victory as Shin Kyuk Ho was dismissed from his chairmanship of Lotte holdings and nine other affiliates and certain key executives previously appointed by Shin Kyuk Ho resigned this week. The shareholders further supported all the agenda proposed by Shin Dong bin and backed him to manage the group both in Korea and Japan at the special meeting of Lotte Holdings held in Tokyo on August 17. However, we believe this sequence of events surrounding chaebol family may just fizzle out and become one more forgotten episode in the Korean chaebol family drama absent regulatory enforcement.