A South Korean court ordered SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won to pay his ex-wife Roh Soh-yeong 944 billion won, roughly $644 million, in a divorce settlement that caps years of legal battles rooted in infidelity and a former president's slush fund.

The ruling, reported by BBC News, marks the latest turn in what Korean media have called the "divorce of the century." Chey, who leads South Korea's second-largest corporate conglomerate, filed for divorce in 2017 after admitting he had fathered a child with another woman. The 35-year marriage collapsed, and the legal fight over assets has ground through South Korean courts ever since.

The $644 million figure is large by any standard, but it is actually a reduction. A lower court in 2024 ordered Chey to pay 1.38 trillion won, roughly $940 million. South Korea's Supreme Court overturned that verdict, ruling that funds tied to a slush fund maintained by Roh's father, former President Roh Tae-woo, were illegally obtained and could not be counted as part of the couple's shared assets.

The case was sent back to the appellate level, and the Seoul High Court's new ruling set the award at 944 billion won. The award still needs to be finalized.

A slush fund from a former president shaped the settlement

The slush fund question sits at the center of the dispute. During a 2024 trial, Roh Soh-yeong's legal team argued that Chey had received significant help from her father, Roh Tae-woo, who served as South Korea's president from 1988 to 1993. The court found that Roh Tae-woo gave Chey 30 billion Korean won from his slush fund in 1991, money that helped build the fortune Chey now controls.

The Supreme Court's intervention changed the math. By ruling that slush fund money was illegally obtained, the justices excluded it from the pool of marital assets subject to division. That single legal determination cut the payout by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Chey's lawyers issued a statement after the ruling. They said the chairman "is deeply sorry in that [the divorce] proceedings so far have caused concern to many people," adding, "We will share specific response to the verdict after we closely review the ruling." Whether Chey plans to appeal remains unclear.

High-profile divorce settlements, whether in Seoul or in the United States, tend to expose the messy intersection of wealth, power, and personal failure. In Texas, Ken and Angela Paxton recently called off their own divorce trial, signaling a private settlement in a case that drew national attention.

SK Hynix's AI-driven surge made the stakes enormous

What makes this case financially extraordinary is timing. SK Group is no longer just a conglomerate with roots in textiles and telecommunications. Its semiconductor subsidiary, SK Hynix, supplies chips to Nvidia and has ridden the global AI boom to staggering valuations.

SK Hynix surpassed $1 trillion in value on the South Korean stock market in May. The company raised $26.5 billion in a New York share offering described as the largest-ever listing by a foreign firm in the United States. SK Hynix shares have risen roughly tenfold since the start of 2025, more than doubling Chey's personal fortune to approximately $5 billion.

That surge turned the valuation date of Chey's assets into a central legal dispute. An earlier appeals court had ordered Chey to hand over 35 percent of his assets, worth close to $1 billion at the time. But as the stock price kept climbing, the question of when to measure his wealth carried hundreds of millions of dollars in consequences.

SK Group began as a textile company in 1953. Today it operates SK Telecom and SK petrol stations across South Korea, and its chip-making arm has become one of the most valuable technology companies in Asia. The conglomerate ranks as the second-largest chaebol, a family-controlled industrial group, in South Korea, behind only Samsung.

Infidelity and its financial consequences are not unique to South Korean billionaires, of course. In the United States, infidelity claims surfaced publicly during the recent Jelly Roll and Bunnie XO divorce, a reminder that broken trust carries costs at every income level.

South Korea's president praised Chey weeks before the ruling

The ruling arrives at an awkward moment for Chey's public standing. Just last month, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung commended Chey during the unveiling of a landmark AI investment plan, calling him and Samsung chairman JY Lee "Heroes of Korean People."

That praise reflected Chey's role in positioning South Korea as a global player in the AI chip market. But the court's finding, that his fortune was built in part with money from a former president's illegal slush fund, and that his marriage ended because he fathered a child outside it, complicates any narrative of corporate heroism.

Chey filed for divorce in 2017 after publicly acknowledging the affair. He quoted Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" in his announcement, "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way", a literary flourish that did little to soften the public fallout in a country where chaebols and political dynasties are deeply intertwined.

Roh Soh-yeong is the daughter of a former president. Chey runs one of the nation's most powerful companies. Their marriage was, by any measure, a union of South Korean elite power. Its collapse exposed not just personal betrayal but the kind of financial entanglements, slush funds, stock surges, cross-generational wealth transfers, that define how power operates in Seoul's corporate and political circles.

Financial disputes tied to family breakdowns have a way of revealing what institutions prefer to keep quiet. In the United States, Hunter Biden was ordered to hand over financial records in a reopened child support fight, another case where court proceedings forced a public accounting that the parties involved would rather have avoided.

Open questions remain as finalization looms

Several questions remain unanswered. The court's award still needs to be finalized, and the specific steps required before that happens are unclear. Whether Chey will appeal this latest ruling, or accept the reduced figure and move on, has not been disclosed. His lawyers' statement promised a "specific response" after reviewing the ruling but offered no timeline.

BBC News contacted SK Group for comment. No response was reported.

The broader question, what specific assets were divided, and how the court valued Chey's rapidly appreciating holdings in the middle of an AI-driven stock boom, remains opaque. Courts in South Korea, like courts everywhere, tend to keep the granular details of asset division out of public view.

Celebrity and political divorces often generate headlines, but the real damage tends to land on the people closest to the principals, children, families, and employees whose lives are shaped by decisions they had no part in making.

A $644 million divorce settlement is the kind of number that grabs attention. But the facts underneath it, a slush fund from a disgraced president, an affair that ended a 35-year marriage, and a fortune inflated by the AI chip boom, tell a story about what happens when personal failure meets unchecked power. Courts exist to impose accountability where character did not.