A South Korean court has ordered SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won to pay his ex-wife Roh Soh-yeong 944 billion won, about $644 million, in a divorce settlement after years of litigation that involved an affair and funds tied to a former president. The decision reduces an earlier award and hinges on whether money from a slush fund should be counted as marital property.
The legal fight began after Chey filed for divorce in 2017 following public admission that he had fathered a child with another woman, ending a 35-year marriage. The case has been framed in Korean media as a massive, high-profile split, and courts have been asked to untangle an unusual mix of private wrongs and public money. Family and corporate reputations have been on display throughout the proceedings.
An earlier 2024 decision had ordered Chey to pay 1.38 trillion won, roughly $940 million, but South Korea’s Supreme Court overturned that verdict. The justices ruled that certain funds tied to Roh Soh-yeong’s father, former President Roh Tae-woo, were illegally obtained and therefore could not be treated as shared marital assets. That finding forced the case back to the appellate level and changed the arithmetic of the settlement by hundreds of millions of dollars.
The Seoul High Court then set the award at 944 billion won, a figure that still must be finalized before any payment is made. The dispute over which assets count as marital property became the core issue, not only the size of Chey’s holdings but the provenance of money that helped build them. How courts value fast-rising stock holdings has been especially consequential in this dispute.
At the heart of the controversy is the court finding that Roh Tae-woo gave Chey 30 billion Korean won from a slush fund in 1991, money the judges judged to be illegally obtained. By excluding that sum from marital assets, the Supreme Court effectively reduced the pool available for division. That legal determination reshaped decades of wealth accumulation into a smaller divisible estate.
Chey’s legal team issued a carefully worded public response after the appellate ruling, saying the chairman “is deeply sorry in that [the divorce] proceedings so far have caused concern to many people,” adding, “We will share specific response to the verdict after we closely review the ruling.” The statement did not specify whether Chey will appeal, and observers expect further legal maneuvering before the matter is finally resolved.
Timing magnified the stakes because SK Group’s semiconductor arm, SK Hynix, surged during the global AI boom. SK Hynix surpassed $1 trillion in market value on the South Korean exchange and completed a $26.5 billion New York share offering described as one of the largest foreign listings in the United States. Those market moves more than doubled Chey’s personal fortune to an estimated $5 billion, making the valuation date a hotly contested point in court.
An earlier appeals court had calculated a division that would have required Chey to give up roughly 35 percent of his assets, a share worth close to $1 billion at the time. But with SK Hynix shares rising roughly tenfold since the start of 2025, the moment when assets are measured produced massive differences in the ultimate award. That volatility turned routine questions about timing into matters of enormous financial consequence.
SK Group traces its roots to a textile business founded in 1953 and now operates telecoms, service stations, and one of Asia’s largest chipmakers. The conglomerate ranks as South Korea’s second-largest chaebol, behind Samsung, and its transformation into a tech-focused power has sharpened scrutiny of its leadership. Chey’s role in steering SK into semiconductors propelled him into the center of both praise and controversy.
Just weeks before the recent ruling, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung publicly commended Chey and another industry leader, calling him and Samsung chairman JY Lee “Heroes of Korean People.” That praise highlighted Chey’s part in promoting national AI ambitions but collided with court findings that traced part of his wealth to funds tied to a disgraced presidency. The mix of public honors and legal setbacks complicates any simple narrative about corporate achievement.
High-profile divorces tend to expose the messy overlap of private behavior, public money, and corporate power, and this case is no exception. The affair that ended a decades-long marriage, the slush fund controversy, and the AI-driven jump in stock value together created a rare legal tangle. Courts are being asked to do more than split assets; they’re being asked to adjudicate how power and wealth were built in the first place.
Several questions remain as the award awaits final legal steps, including whether Chey will appeal and how exactly the courts will sort rising stock valuations from alleged illicit funds. The granular details of which assets were divided and how remain largely out of public view, leaving room for further filings and possible adjustments. For now, the case stands as a high-profile example of how personal decisions intersect with national economic currents and legal limits.
