Tech billionaire ordered to pay $640mn in South Korea’s ‘divorce of the century’

When they wed, they personified the infamous collusion between politics and big business that long plagued South Korea’s economy.

SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won was ordered Friday to pay 944 billion won ($644 million) to his former wife, Roh Soh-yeong, in a retrial of their high-profile property division lawsuit.

The cash award to Chey's former spouse is a record for South Korea, even though substantially lower than a settlement of 1.38 trillion won ordered by the appeals court in 2024.

SK Group runs SK Hynix, the semiconductor giant that supplies chips to Nvidia and recently made a record-setting debut on the US stock market.