[Courtesy of Hanjin Group]
SEOUL -- The 43-year-old only son of Hanjin Group's late patriarch, Cho Yang-ho, became group chairman, a week after he presided over a funeral for his father who died of chronic lung disease at an American hospital.
In appointing Korean Air president Cho Won-tae as chairman on Wednesday, the board of Hanjin KAL, the group's holding company, said it was an inevitable decision to minimize the group's leadership vacuum following the unexpected death of his father on April 8.
"Cho's appointment as new chairman is a decision to minimize the leadership vacuum of the late chairman Cho Yang-ho and to continue stable group management," the holding company said in a statement, adding the new chairman vowed to focus on "field-oriented management and communication management."
As the death of his father led to the group's third-generation transfer of leadership in a state of unpreparedness, Cho Won-tae, who joined the group in 2003 and became Korean Air's president in 2017, has a mountain of work to consolidate his group-wide control as Hanjin is under pressure to enhance its corporate governance and transparency in accounting and management.
Like other family-run conglomerates, the Cho family has controlled the group through a complex web of cross-shareholdings. Cho Yang-ho had owned 17.84 percent in the holding company, while his son and two daughters control up to 2.34 percent, respectively.
The late tycoon had stayed in the United States for treatment from December last year. He was absent from a shareholders' meeting on March 27, when some foreign investors and minority shareholders sided with the National Pension Service (NPS), the second-largest shareholder, to vote for his ouster from Korean Air's board.
Hanjin was hit hard by a scandal involving the chairman's youngest daughter, Cho Hyun-min, who allegedly threw a glass cup and sprayed plum juice during a business meeting with advertising agency officials. The scandal fueled public anger, leading to multiple investigations into the chairman, his wife and children on charges of creating a slush fund, evading taxes, bringing in luxury foreign goods illegally, abusing and assaulting company employees and others. No one has been arrested.
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