A South Korean court has ordered gaming tycoon Kwon Hyuk-bin to pay his ex-wife 2.55tr won ($1.87bn; \u00a31.38bn) in assets, marking the largest divorce settlement in the country’s history.<\/p>\n
Kwon, who founded South Korea’s third-largest video game company Smilegate, is one of the country’s richest men. Bloomberg puts his net worth at $3bn.<\/p>\n
Smilegate was wholly owned by him until Wednesday when a court ruled that a 35% stake, valued at about 2.5tr won, be transferred to his wife Lee Hwa-jin. He was also ordered to pay her an additional 65bn won in cash.<\/p>\n
This settlement is more than double the previous record of 944bn won which tech titan Chey Tae-won was ordered to pay his ex-wife.<\/p>\n
In filing for divorce with Kwon, Lee had sought a 50% stake in Smilegate. Her lawyers argued that she had helped finance the company at its founding, according to Bloomberg. <\/p>\n
Kwon and Lee got married in 2001, a year before he founded Smilegate. Its best-known titles include the first-person shooter game CrossFire and the action role-playing game Lost Ark.<\/p>\n
Lee also said she spent more than 20 years raising their children and caring for their household.<\/p>\n
Kwon in turn argued that Lee neither invested nor worked for the company. Earlier this year, Smilegate published a statement saying all of the company’s initial capital came from Kwon.<\/p>\n
A Smilegate spokesperson declined to “comment on the major shareholder’s personal matters”. <\/p>\n
“We will continue to faithfully perform our duties as usual,” they said in a statement cited by The Chosun Daily.<\/p>\n
Both parties can still challenge the ruling.<\/p>\n
In July this year, Chey Tae-won, the chairman of the corporate giant SK Group, was ordered to pay his ex-wife 944bn won which, prior to today’s ruling, was the largest divorce award in Korean history.<\/p>\n
However, this was later struck down by the Supreme Court who cited a miscalculation that increased the value of the couple’s assets. It has ordered the case to be reviewed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A South Korean court has ordered gaming tycoon Kwon Hyuk-bin to pay his ex-wife 2.55tr won ($1.87bn; \u00a31.38bn)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":764985,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[84,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-764984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-business","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=764984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/764984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/764985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=764984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=764984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=764984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}