SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won has filed an appeal against the Seoul High Court's divorce ruling, returning his long-running legal battle with Roh So-young — former director of Art Center Nabi — over a 944 billion won ($668 million) property settlement to the Supreme Court.

The appeal, lodged on Friday, came just before the midnight deadline for challenging the ruling. Had neither party appealed, the high court's decision would have become final. Supreme Court review in South Korea generally addresses questions of law and procedure rather than re-weighing factual findings, and there is no fixed timeline for a final ruling.

Under the July ruling, the Seoul High Court ordered Chey to pay Roh 944 billion won in cash, along with approximately 129.3 million won in daily delay damages, to accrue from the day after the ruling becomes final until payment is completed. The award is the largest ever handed down in a South Korean divorce case.

The July verdict was a sharp escalation from the first-instance decision in December 2022, when the Seoul Family Court ordered Chey to pay 66.5 billion won in property division plus 100 million won in alimony. Roh appealed, seeking roughly 1.2 trillion won including half of Chey's stake in SK Inc., the group's holding company. The high court declined to order a transfer of shares, awarding cash instead — an outcome that kept the ownership structure of SK Inc., which sits atop South Korea's second-largest conglomerate by revenue and counts memory-chip maker SK Hynix among its affiliates, untouched by the ruling.

The dispute traces back to 2015, when Chey publicly disclosed that he had fathered a child outside of marriage and opened divorce mediation proceedings with Roh. The mediation ended without agreement, leading Chey to file for divorce in 2018. Roh responded with a countersuit in December 2019. The couple married in 1988; Roh is the daughter of former South Korean President Roh Tae-woo.

Source: Korea Herald Business