South Korea's most closely watched judicial mediation is entering a new phase. The Seoul High Court has scheduled an additional court mediation hearing in the asset-division dispute between SK Group chairman Chey Tae-won and Roh Soh-yeong, daughter of the late president Roh Tae-woo.
The stakes are difficult to overstate. An appellate ruling had awarded roughly 1.38 trillion won — about US$922 million — in asset division, the largest in Korean history, before the Supreme Court overturned it in October, citing legality concerns surrounding an alleged 30 billion won slush fund while upholding the divorce itself and a 2 billion won alimony award.
With the case remanded, the High Court has turned to judicial mediation to search for a negotiated end to a dispute that has hung over the governance of one of Korea's largest conglomerates for years. Court-led mediation is a routine feature of Korean civil procedure, but rarely has it carried consequences of this scale for a chaebol's control structure.
Whatever the outcome, the case is a vivid demonstration of a broader pattern across Asia: even the region's most adversarial, highest-value disputes increasingly pass through a mediated channel before — or instead of — final adjudication.
