SEOUL, South Korea — A South Korean court issued a ruling on Friday ordering SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won to pay his former wife 944 billion won (approximately $640 million) in a legal battle frequently described by local media as the “divorce of the century.”
The decision from the Seoul High Court follows a Supreme Court mandate for the appellate court to conduct a further review of the divorce proceedings between Chey and Roh So-yeong, the daughter of the late South Korean President Roh Tae-woo.
The final settlement awarded to Roh, who serves as a director for a Seoul art museum, is less than the 1.38 trillion won ($940 million) previously mandated by the high court last year. Additionally, Chey had been ordered to pay 2 billion won ($1.3 million) in alimony.
The financial landscape of the case has shifted as the value of Chey’s holdings has grown, driven largely by the surge in SK Hynix shares amid the global expansion of artificial intelligence.
A key component of the high court’s previous ruling involved findings that Roh’s father had allegedly provided SK with 30 billion won ($20.4 million) in slush funds during his presidency. However, the Supreme Court later determined that these funds could not be legally classified as a contribution to the company’s corporate growth.
Chey and Roh married in 1988 and have three children. The legal separation began in 2017 after Chey sought a divorce following the disclosure of an extramarital relationship and the birth of a child from that union.
Neither Chey nor Roh, who was absent from Friday’s proceedings, attended the hearing. The case may return to the Supreme Court should either party file a further appeal.
Chey is currently among a delegation of South Korean business leaders traveling to the United States with President Lee Jae Myung. The delegation is scheduled to meet with prominent U.S. technology executives in San Francisco, including Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, to advocate for investment in South Korean semiconductor and AI sectors.
