Seoul (South Korea): A South Korean appellate court on Friday ordered SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won to pay 944 billion won ($640 million) to his ex-wife, Roh So-yeong, concluding the latest chapter in a high-profile legal dispute widely termed the “divorce of the century.” The Seoul High Court delivered the revised ruling following a Supreme Court directive instructing the appellate bench to reassess its previous financial division framework.
The revised property division award for Roh—director of the Art Center Nabi museum and daughter of former South Korean President Roh Tae-woo—is lower than the 1.38 trillion won ($940 million) settlement ordered by the high court last year. The Supreme Court previously intervened to reject the high court’s finding that slush funds allegedly provided by Roh’s late father contributed legally to SK Group’s commercial expansion. In addition to the property settlement, Chey remains under a prior judicial order to pay 2 billion won ($1.3 million) in alimony.
Despite the reduced settlement percentage, Chey’s total net worth experienced significant growth in recent months, driven by a surge in the valuation of SK Hynix, the conglomerate’s semiconductor affiliate benefiting from the global artificial intelligence boom. Chey and Roh married in 1988 and have three adult children. The executive initiated formal divorce proceedings in 2017 following public disclosures regarding an extramarital relationship.
Neither party attended the high court session on Friday, and both retain the legal right to appeal the revised division back to the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Chey joined a South Korean business delegation traveling to San Francisco alongside President Lee Jae Myung to meet with American technology executives—including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei—to discuss foreign investment in domestic artificial intelligence and semiconductor infrastructure.
