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

What the report says

The Financial Times reported that South Korean technology billionaire Chey Tae-won has been ordered to pay $640mn in a high-profile divorce case that has been described in South Korea as the “divorce of the century.” The supplied FT snippet says the ruling against Chey, identified as chair of chipmaker SK Hynix, comes about a decade after he publicly disclosed an extramarital affair.

The publicly available text of the FT article was not supplied, so the excerpt does not establish the court that issued the ruling, the local-currency amount, whether the order is final, or what legal arguments were accepted. The core confirmed development from the named publisher is the size of the payment order and its connection to Chey’s long-running marital dispute following his admission of an affair.

For context beyond the FT snippet, Chey is widely known as the head of South Korea’s SK business group, whose companies include SK Hynix, one of the world’s largest memory-chip makers. His estranged wife, Roh Soh-yeong, is the daughter of former South Korean president Roh Tae-woo, a background that has added public and political interest to the divorce proceedings.

The case matters because it links one of South Korea’s most prominent corporate leaders to a major personal financial judgment at a time when SK Hynix plays a strategically important role in the global semiconductor supply chain. However, based on the supplied evidence, there is no basis to conclude that the ruling changes SK Hynix’s governance or Chey’s corporate position.