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(Bloomberg) — SK Hynix Inc. billionaire Chey Tae-won is set to receive a fresh court ruling on a long-running divorce dispute with his former wife, bringing their acrimonious legal battle closer to a conclusion.
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In what is likely to become South Korea’s most expensive divorce ever, the Seoul High Court is set to announce Friday how much of Chey’s fortune it has determined must be shared with ex-wife Roh Soh-yeong. Chey is worth about $5.5 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
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The ruling hinges on how Korean courts assess the value of a spouse’s contribution to building one of the country’s largest business empires. Roh initially demanded 42.29% of Chey’s SK Inc. shares, a request which could have put his control of the company in question. She later changed her request to cash.
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SK Hynix has emerged as one of the biggest winners from booming demand for high-bandwidth memory chips used in artificial intelligence, lifting the value of the broader SK empire and raising the financial stakes of the case. The company vaulted into the global spotlight after raising $26.5 billion in a US listing this month, a record for a foreign issuer, and its market value has topped $1 trillion.
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The couple married in 1988 and have three children together. But things began to unravel publicly in 2015, when Chey, who is chairman of SK Group, revealed he had a child with another woman.
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In 2024, a court ordered Chey to pay Roh 1.38 trillion won ($1 billion), South Korea’s largest divorce award. But after Chey appealed, the Supreme Court overturned the ruling, saying it had improperly counted alleged illicit funds from Roh’s father, former president Roh Tae-woo, toward her contribution to the couple’s wealth.
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Roh, the daughter of a former South Korean president, has argued that her family’s political and social support aided SK’s rise from a mid-sized energy company into one of South Korea’s largest business groups. Chey maintained that his SK Inc. shares originated from assets provided by his father and should be treated as separate property.
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Any sizeable cash obligation would raise questions about how it could be financed, whether through borrowing, asset sales or other transactions involving Chey’s holdings. There is little expectation that SK Group’s control structure is in immediate jeopardy. The Friday ruling could also be appealed again to the Supreme Court.
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South Korea’s largest known divorce-related property settlement took place in 2005, when NCsoft founder Kim Taek-jin transferred 356,461 shares of the game developer, then valued at nearly 30 billion won, to his former wife, according to a local media report.
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