Court Orders SK's Chey Tae-won to Pay 944 Billion Won to Ex-Spouse

A Korean court has ordered SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won to hand his former wife, Roh So-young, 944 billion won as his share of their divided marital assets — a ruling that ranks among the largest property settlements ever handed down against a sitting head of a major Korean conglomerate. The figure alone is large enough to reshape the personal balance sheet of a man who sits atop the country’s second-biggest business group.

Why the Sum Lands So Hard

To grasp the weight of the order, measure it against the fortune it draws from. Forbes put Chey’s personal wealth at 4.7 billion US dollars as of July 2026 — meaning the court-ordered payment absorbs a substantial fraction of everything he is estimated to own. This is not a rounding error against a boundless fortune; it is a claim large enough to force decisions about how the money, much of it tied up in corporate holdings rather than cash, would actually be raised.

That distinction matters in the Korean context, where the wealth of a group chairman is rarely liquid. It is bound into equity stakes that anchor control over the wider organization, so a payment of this scale invites scrutiny of whether shares must move, be pledged, or otherwise be leveraged to satisfy it.

The Man at the Center

Chey Tae-won was born on December 3, 1960, in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province. He took command of SK Group at the age of 38, stepping up after the death of his father, Chey Jong-hyun, and has run the organization through more than two decades of expansion since.

His record is not without turbulence. In January 2013 a Seoul District Court convicted him and imposed a four-year prison term over the embezzlement of more than 40 million dollars — a chapter that underscored how closely the fate of Korea’s family-led groups is tied to the personal legal fortunes of the individuals who lead them. Beyond SK itself, Chey has served as chairman of the Korea Chamber of Commerce and Industry since March 2021, giving him a platform as one of the most visible voices in Korean business.

What SK Group Has at Stake

SK ranks as the second-largest business conglomerate in South Korea and spans 186 affiliated companies, a sprawl that touches semiconductors, energy, telecommunications and beyond. Control across that web depends on carefully arranged shareholdings, and any settlement that could compel the movement of equity draws immediate attention from investors watching the group’s ownership structure.

The core question a payment of this magnitude raises is not whether Chey can afford it in the abstract, but how it is financed — and whether the mechanics touch the shares that hold the group’s chain of command together. For a network this large, even a personal legal matter reverberates into questions of corporate stability.

The Larger Pattern

The ruling arrives as a reminder of how thin the wall is between the private lives of Korea’s founding families and the fortunes of the companies they steer. In a system where a single individual’s stake can determine control over scores of affiliates, a courtroom decision about marital assets becomes, unavoidably, a corporate story. The coming period will show how SK’s leadership absorbs a financial claim measured not in the group’s revenues but against one person’s estimated net worth — and whether the structures that concentrate that wealth prove as durable under legal pressure as they have under market pressure.