One of South Korea’s most closely watched and financially massive divorce cases reached a new milestone Friday, when the Seoul High Court ordered SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won, one of the nation’s wealthiest business leaders, to transfer 944 billion won ($640 million) in assets to his ex-wife Roh So-yeong. The ruling, which local media has widely labeled the “divorce of the century”, comes after South Korea’s Supreme Court sent the case back to the appellate court for re-evaluation last year.
Roh, who currently serves as a director of a prominent Seoul-based art museum, is the daughter of late former South Korean President Roh Tae-woo. The latest asset award is lower than the 1.38 trillion won ($940 million) the Seoul High Court initially ordered Chey to pay in 2023. The tycoon was also previously ordered to cover 2 billion won ($1.3 million) in spousal support payments.
The revised valuation of the settlement is tied to recent changes in Chey’s overall asset base, which has grown alongside the global AI boom that has driven sharp gains in shares of SK Hynix, SK Group’s leading semiconductor subsidiary. The Supreme Court’s 2023 remand centered on a key point of disagreement in the original ruling: the lower court had anchored part of its settlement on a finding that Roh’s father provided SK Group with 30 billion won ($20.4 million) in undeclared slush funds during his presidency, a contribution that it ruled helped drive the conglomerate’s growth. But the Supreme Court rejected the argument that these unreported funds could be legally recognized as a contribution to SK’s expansion, requiring the lower court to recalculate the settlement.
Chey and Roh first married in 1988 and share three children together. The case began in 2017, when Chey filed for divorce after publicly confirming he had entered a relationship with another woman and fathered a child with that partner. Neither Chey nor Roh appeared at Friday’s ruling session. Either party has the right to appeal the new ruling to South Korea’s Supreme Court, which would send the case back to the nation’s highest court for another review.
Notably, Chey is currently part of a delegation of top South Korean business leaders accompanying President Lee Jae Myung on a visit to the United States. During his trip, Lee is scheduled to meet leading U.S. technology executives including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in San Francisco Friday. The trip’s core goal is to pitch foreign investment in South Korea’s expanding artificial intelligence and semiconductor sectors, two industries that are central to the nation’s economic growth strategy.