Ex-Wife In Korea's $645M "Divorce Of The Century" Gets Iced Out Of AI Boom

A Seoul court has ordered SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won to pay his ex-wife 944 billion won ($645 million), in the largest divorce award in South Korean history. And while the figure is a record, it was calculated against a stock price more than two years old - before it went ballistic in the AI boom. 

The Seoul High Court's First Family Division, presiding judge Lee Sang-ju, issued the ruling on Friday, nine years after Chey filed for divorce mediation in 2017. The court ordered the money paid in cash with 5 percent annual interest from the day after the judgment becomes final, and declined to hand over any stock, citing the role Chey's shares play in his control of the group, according to the WSJ. Neither side has said whether it will appeal again.

Chey did not attend. He was in California, accompanying President Lee Jae-myung on a San Francisco trip and dining with Nvidia chief executive Jensen Huang in Woodside.

The Two-Year-Old Price

The court fixed the valuation at April 16, 2024, the date arguments closed in the earlier appeal. SK Inc. finished that session at 160,000 won ($110) a share, putting Chey's 17.9 percent stake at roughly 2.07 trillion won ($1.4 billion). When arguments closed in the remand trial on June 26, 2026, the stock closed at 810,000 won ($555). Five times higher thanks to an AI boom that runs from Nvidia's high-bandwidth memory orders through SK Hynix, up through SK Square, and into the holding company at the top.

Roh's lawyers argued for the June 2026 date. Chey's argued for April 2024. The court sided with Chey. Supreme Court precedent holds that divisible property is measured as of the closing of the last fact-finding trial, which the court took to be the pre-remand appeal. It added that share prices are volatile and listed stock is a cash-equivalent asset that can be sold at any time, so declining to split gains that land after a marriage has legally ended does not obviously defeat the purpose of an equitable division.

The court acknowledged the price had risen sharply between the two dates, said Chey's management deserved credit for part of that, and stated that it had taken the surge into account in setting the division ratio rather than in the valuation. 

On what Roh contributed, the court was more generous than the first-instance judge had been in 2022, when he ruled the SK shares were Chey's separate property and awarded her 66.5 billion won ($45 million). Her homemaking, her raising of the couple's three children and her public activity on the group's behalf, the court found, had helped form and sustain the value of the stock. It rejected Chey's argument that the shares were inherited and gifted assets outside the marriage. Then it set her share at one-third.

The Bribe That Counted For Nothing

Two years ago a different panel awarded Roh 1.3808 trillion won ($945 million) after she argued that her father's money helped build the company, and that Chey's SK shares were therefore a joint dynastic project rather than his alone. To prove it, her side put a slush fund memo written by her mother, Kim Ok-sook, into evidence, documenting 90.4 billion won ($62 million), and argued that 30 billion won ($21 million) of former President Roh Tae-woo's slush money had passed to SK founding chairman Chey Jong-hyun in 1991 and gone toward the acquisition of Pacific Securities and other business.

In May 2024, the appellate court accepted it. It found the transfer real, treated the money as seed capital, and found that Roh Tae-woo had smoothed regulatory obstacles for SK's move into mobile telecoms during his 1988-1993 presidency, playing what it called "the role of a protective shield" for the elder Chey. It valued the couple's joint property at some 4 trillion won ($2.7 billion), set Roh's share at 35 percent, and ordered 1.3808 trillion won ($945 million) paid.

On October 16, 2025, the Supreme Court's First Division threw that out. The money may well have moved, the justices held, and that was the problem. Roh Tae-woo was arrested in 1995 and convicted the following year of taking hundreds of billions of won (hundreds of millions of dollars) from businessmen, and Article 746 of the Civil Act bars anyone from suing over a benefit conferred for an illegal purpose. A president routing part of a bribe to his in-laws and staying silent about it was, in the court's words, so markedly anti-social, unethical and immoral as to fall outside the protection of the law. Since the conduct had no legal value worth protecting, it could not be counted as his daughter's contribution when the marital estate was divided.

Roh's lawyers had a reply. She was not trying to recover the money, only to have its effect acknowledged. The court was not interested.

On remand, the 30 billion won ($21 million) came out and her ratio slipped from 35 percent to one-third - a small move, because the slush fund had never carried much weight in the ratio to begin with. The larger cut came from a second holding in the same Supreme Court ruling: shares Chey had gifted to his younger brother and other relatives before the marriage collapsed were not divisible property either. The estate shrank while her percentage held roughly steady, and the award fell by 436.8 billion won ($300 million).

Now He Has To Find The Cash

Chey holds 12,975,472 SK Inc. shares, 17.90 percent, worth roughly 8.5 trillion won ($5.8 billion) at last Thursday's close. The award is about 11 percent of that - and the court told him to pay it in money, not stock.