S Korean tycoons pay tribute to late Samsung chief
SEOUL: South Korea’s billionaire business leaders lined up yesterday to pay respects to the late Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Kun-hee, for decades the country’s richest and most powerful industrialist.
SEOUL: Korean Air chairman Cho Won-tae (front) arrives at a funeral hall to attend a mourning ritual for the late Samsung Electronics chairman Lee Kun-Hee at Samsung Medical Center in Seoul yesterday.-AFP
Lee died aged 78 on Sunday, six years after suffering a heart attack that had left him bedridden. Under his leadership, Samsung became the world’s largest producer of smartphones and memory chips, and the firm’s overall turnover today is equivalent to a fifth of South Korea’s GDP.
It is by far the largest of the chaebols, the sprawling family-controlled conglomerates that dominate business in the country. Attendance at Lee’s mourning ritual-which runs until Wednesday-will be kept low because of the coronavirus pandemic, Samsung said. But a series of top politicians and tycoons arrived at the Samsung Medical Center in Seoul to pay tribute to Lee yesterday, including Hyundai Motor Group chief Chung Eui-sun and Korean Air chairman Cho Won-tae. “It’s very sad that a great man has passed away,” Chung told reporters, praising Lee’s leadership “across entire fields of the country’s business community”.
Lee Kun-hee himself was twice convicted of criminal offences, in one case for bribing a president, though he was later pardoned. His son and heir Lee Jae-yong is currently being retried on corruption and other offences linked to the scandal that brought down former president Park Geun-hye. He also faces a separate fraud case over company deals said to be linked to his succession. – Reuters
