Pei Yongjun faded out of the fluorescent screen for many years and was recently targeted by the South Korean Internal Revenue Service

Bae Yongjun has transformed from an entertainer to a businessman and was recently targeted by the Internal Revenue Service. (From Instagram)

The 48-year-old Pei Yongjun faded out of the fluorescent screen for many years, and was recently targeted by the South Korean Internal Revenue Service, which is strictly investigating his stock transactions and other tax accounts. SM Entertainment, which has been thoroughly investigated, was found to have falsely declared its tax bill and was directly fined more than 1 billion yuan (KRW, the same below).

Bae Yong-joon was previously the owner and largest shareholder of the agency Keyeast, and many of the company's well-known artists, including Kim So-hyun, Park Su-joon, Ju Ji-hoon and other male gods. Pei Yongjun transformed from an actor to a showbiz trader, retreating behind the scenes and rarely appearing. But his pace of making money has not stopped, and in 2018, he sold his 25.12% stake in Keyeast to SM Entertainment boss Li Xiuman, making a lot of 50 billion yuan.

Pei Yongjun's business acumen moved quickly, relying on the transfer of stocks to make more than 5 times profits, and also became one of the major shareholders of SM Entertainment, and the two sides joined forces to expand their business territory. However, South Korea's Internal Revenue Service has made a big move this month to conduct a tax clearance, listing Lee So-man and Bae Yong-joon as key investigation targets to see if they all complied with the regulations in the process of transferring shares.

Because of the global gold-sucking trend of Hallyu, the income of large entertainment companies at home and abroad is quite amazing, and they naturally take pains to save taxes. The IRS has first recovered SM Entertainment's 20.2 billion yuan in taxes, and now it has imposed penalties on false tax bills, which means killing chickens and scaring monkeys.

However, SM Entertainment is not the first time to be audited for taxes, Li Xiuman has hired someone to deal with it, and the old god is saying: "We will face it honestly." The IRS began investigating SM Entertainment's finances in October last year, and it took nearly five months to recover the huge amount of taxes.