As we all know, the death of every old president of the Korean chaebol family will trigger several bloody succession wars...
This time, it is also the turn of LG Group, the fourth largest enterprise in South Korea, which has always been peaceful...
At the beginning of last year, the widow and two daughters of the former chairman of LG Group, Shigeru Goomoto, took the current chairman and adopted son Koo Kwangmo to court, demanding that he get back all of his estate...
It is said that this was the first time that an inheritance dispute occurred since the establishment of the LG Group in 1947... The lawsuit has been going on for almost a year, and there is no conclusion yet, and the latest development is that Gu Benmao's eldest daughter also wants to participate in the management of the group, probably to fight for some rights...
(Screenshot of SBS News)
In 2017, Shigeru Goomoto, the third chairman of LG Group, was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and after brain tumor surgery at the end of the year, he was in poor health and could not speak...
(Shigeru Gumoto)
In May 2018, he died without leaving a will, and his estate, which is worth about $1.5 billion, became the focus of contention...
In order to stabilize the hearts of the group and the control of the family, the family members of Gu Ben Shigeru reached a consensus after several rounds of negotiations and completed the distribution of the estate.
The family composition of Gu Ben-mao is very simple, with only one wife, Kim Young-sik, and has given birth to a son Gu Yuanmo, daughters Gu Yeon-kyung and Gu Yeon-so... His son, Gu Yuanmo, died in a car accident in 1994.
Since LG Group, like most conglomerates in South Korea, practices a primogeniture system, in 2004 Mr. and Mrs. Goomoto adopted the eldest son of their younger brother Goomoto Aya, who is their nephew Gu Guangmo.
(Gu Guangmo)
Although Gu Guangmo's father, Gu Ben Aya, is also a member of the Gu family, his mind is not on running a business, so they belong to the fringe of the family. When Koo adopted him, he had already graduated from the Rochester Institute of Technology and studied computer engineering.
But after being adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Goo Moto, he was directly upgraded to the core focus of the group, the future successor, and began to accept the heir training model...
He first joined LG in 2006 to study business management, then entered the Stanford Graduate School of Business in the United States, worked in Silicon Valley for a year, and joined the HE business of LG Electronics in New Jersey, USA.
(Gu Guangmo)
A few years before his death, Gu Guangmo had been appointed as the executive director of the management strategy group of LG Group, holding 6.24% of the shares, and was on the Forbes rich list in South Korea...
After the death of Goo Ben-mao, according to Korean law, in the case of intestate, the spouse Kim Young-sik should get one-third of the inheritance, and the rest will be divided equally between Gu Guangmo and his two biological daughters.
But in the end, Gu Guangmo inherited 8.8% of the 11.3% of LG's shares, holding a total of 15% of the shares, and became the fourth generation head of LG Group in June of that year.
The remaining 2.5% of the shares were inherited by Mr. Kooto's two daughters, who also inherited Mr. Gooto's other personal assets, including financial products, real estate and art, with a total value of about $379 million.
In the years since the inheritance has been distributed, the two parties have been at peace...
Because he inherited most of the estate, Gu Guangmo needs to pay about 630 million US dollars in inheritance tax, which is said to be the highest inheritance tax in South Korea's history, and it must be paid in installments within 5 years, after which he can officially get his shares...
Perhaps because of too much pressure to pay off the high inheritance tax, in September 2022, Gu Guangmo filed a lawsuit against the director of the Yongsan Tax Office, claiming that part of the inheritance tax was over-taxed and demanded that it be cancelled... Kim Young-sik's mother and daughter were also involved in the lawsuit.
But in February last year, almost five years have passed since the division of property, and Kim Young-sik's mother and daughter suddenly opposed the original distribution of the estate and sued the current president and adopted son Gu Kwangmo to court, demanding that the estate be re-divided...
(Kim Young-suk)
Gu Kwangmo's side tried to dismiss it on the grounds that the three-year prosecution period stipulated in the inheritance law had passed, but failed, because the content of Kim Young-sik's mother-daughter lawsuit contained the keyword "fraud"...
They said that Koo Kwang-mo, together with his biological father Goo Moto Aya and LG executives, falsely claimed that Goo Ben Shigeru had left a will and left all the shares and assets to his adopted son, so as to stabilize the absolute position of the Gu family in the group. After many negotiations, the previous distribution of the estate was reached...
And Goomoto Aya and LG executives found a locksmith to forcibly open Gomoto Shigeru's two safes, I don't know what they took, and they didn't tell them before the action...
Even so, the mother and daughter really became suspicious of Gu Guangmo in 2021, when Gu Benmao's daughter Gu Yeonjing applied for a credit card and found that she was rejected because of her huge debts, and after investigation, it was found that Gu Guangmo used their savings to pay inheritance tax and took their equity to mortgage...
According to Kim Young-sik's mother and daughter, they reached an agreement with Gu Guangmo that the inheritance tax would be paid by Gu Guangmo alone. In addition, according to calculations, Gu Guangmo actually received more inheritance than they had initially agreed, and he alone received 75% of the inheritance.
At this point, the succession war officially began, and Kim Young-sik's mother and daughter demanded that they inherit the entire inheritance of the old president, but did not ask LG to take control...
They submitted to the court recordings of family conversations in recent years, complaining that the friction between them and Gu Guangmo has become more and more intense, and that they have been misled by Gu Guangmo's words... He also took out a letter of explanation from Gu Guangmo before the lawsuit, saying that his employees did not have enough funds to pay inheritance tax in his name, so they used her assets, but they were ready to return the money to her, asking her not to question his inheritance...
(Kim Young-suk)
In the first court negotiation, the two parties argued over the will...
LG President and Chief Financial Officer Ha Beom Jong attended as a witness...
(Ha Bam Jong)
At the time of the death of the former chairman, he was the head of the financial management team of LG Group's holding company, LG, where he was responsible for managing the group's assets.
The mother and daughter said that it was Ha Fan Zhong who had told them that Gu Ben Mao had made a wish to "hand over all management assets to Gu Guangmo" before the operation, but on the same day, Ha Fan Zhong denied the will...
He stressed that LG Group has long practiced the principle of primogeniture, so the assets under management are divided by agreement and there is no separate will.
In short, it seems that Kim Young-sik has a hard time proving the "fraud" before signing the agreement...
A Korean media invited a Seoul lawyer to analyze, and the lawyer meant that from the previous negotiations, although Kim Young-sik had a recording, it would be difficult for them to win the lawsuit if there was no clear evidence.
And not long after the lawsuit began, several lawyers from the mother-daughter three-person lawyer team resigned mysteriously from this lawsuit of hundreds of millions of dollars...
(Resigned lawyer)
However, the mother and daughter have not given up yet, they have been interviewed by international media, trying to use international public opinion to put pressure on Gu Guangmo...
At the end of last month, Goo Yeon-kyung, the daughter of Goo Ben Shigeru, said that she hoped to participate in the management of the group, and was full of confidence in it, as if she intended to develop this family inheritance dispute into a dispute over the management rights of LG Group.
The style of painting has changed again, from fighting for money to fighting for power...
Although in the succession war of the Korean chaebol family, the version of Kim Young-sik mother and daughter is already mild...
But it remains to be seen what this war will turn out of...