The Korean Gum Salesman Who Built an Empire—Then His Sons Tore It Apart

Picture a 92-year-old man firing his own son as chairman of a multi-billion-dollar company. Then, the very next day, that son calling an emergency board meeting and firing his father right back. That's not a soap opera plot. That's exactly what happened inside Lotte Group, South Korea's fifth-largest conglomerate, on July 27 and 28, 2015.

A Gum Salesman in Occupied Japan Builds an Empire

Shin Kyuk-ho's story doesn't start in a Seoul boardroom. It starts in postwar Tokyo, where a young Korean immigrant was scraping by delivering milk and newspapers. In 1948, watching how much American GIs loved chewing gum, he started a small confectionery company and named it Lotte, after Charlotte, the heroine of Goethe's "The Sorrows of Young Werther."

That gum company grew into a sprawling empire spanning candy, hotels, department stores, duty-free shops, and chemicals — first across Japan, then, starting in 1967, back in his home country of Korea. By the time Shin was in his 90s, Lotte was Korea's fifth-biggest chaebol (the family-run conglomerates that dominate the Korean economy), with assets including Guylian Belgian chocolates and New York's landmark Palace Hotel.

The Noodle Feud That Came First

Here's a detail most people miss: the instant noodle brand you probably associate with Korea, Nongshim's Shin Ramyun, actually traces back to a falling-out inside the same family. Shin Kyuk-ho's younger brother, Shin Choon-ho, worked for Lotte before a dispute with Kyuk-ho pushed him to strike out on his own, founding what was originally called Lotte Food Industrial Company in Korea before renaming it Nongshim in 1978. A second brother, Shin Sun-ho, founded yet another noodle company, Sansas, in Japan. Sibling rivalry, in other words, was baked into this family's business DNA long before the sons ever got involved.

Two Sons, One Empire, Zero Warning

Fast forward to the 2010s. Shin Kyuk-ho had two sons: Shin Dong-joo, the elder, who ran Lotte's Japan operations, and Shin Dong-bin, the younger, who'd been running the Korean side and was positioned as heir apparent. The brothers had been quietly jockeying for years, but it exploded into public view in January 2015, when the elder brother, Dong-joo, was abruptly dismissed from his posts at Lotte's Japanese affiliates.

Then came the real fireworks. On July 27, 2015, the 92-year-old patriarch Shin Kyuk-ho tried to reassert control, dismissing his younger son Dong-bin as chairman along with six board directors — reportedly furious that Dong-bin had failed to disclose billions of dollars in losses from Lotte's China operations. It should have been a clean coup by the founder.

It wasn't. As Forbes reported at the time, Dong-bin struck back within 24 hours. He called an emergency board meeting, and Lotte Holdings voted to demote his own father from General Chairman down to the largely ceremonial role of Honorary Chairman. The son had out-maneuvered the man who built the whole company.

The Old Man Sues His Own Kid

What followed reads like a legal thriller. Shin Dong-joo, still smarting from his own earlier firing, sided with his father and called the demotion unlawful. The 93-year-old founder then sued his younger son and Lotte Holdings' board, trying to nullify his own ouster, as Bloomberg documented in October 2015. The father publicly insisted he had never appointed Dong-bin as his true successor.

Underneath the family drama was a genuinely complicated ownership structure — a tangled web of cross-shareholdings between dozens of Lotte affiliates in Korea and Japan, the kind that lets a relatively small ownership stake control a giant empire. Whoever won the vote at Lotte Holdings in Tokyo effectively won control of the whole conglomerate, which is exactly why both sides fought so hard for boardroom votes rather than settling things at the family dinner table.

Photo by nickhvk on Pixabay

Photo by Tranmautritam on Pexels

Then the Criminal Charges Landed

If you thought the succession battle was the low point, it gets worse. In December 2017, a Seoul court sentenced founder Shin Kyuk-ho to four years in prison for embezzlement and tax evasion — prosecutors said he and several family members, including Dong-bin, evaded roughly $76 million in taxes and embezzled around $46 million in company funds. Because of his age, he wasn't actually taken into custody.

Then in February 2018, Dong-bin — the son who'd won the succession war — was separately convicted and jailed for 30 months in an unrelated case: Lotte had funneled 7 billion won (about $6.5 million) to a confidante of disgraced former President Park Geun-hye, allegedly in exchange for a lucrative duty-free store license, as CNN reported. He actually went to prison — for a while, Lotte was a headless multi-billion-dollar conglomerate. An appeals court suspended that sentence in October 2018 and released him.

Shin Kyuk-ho died in January 2020 at 97, reportedly without ever fully reconciling with the son who'd deposed him. Dong-bin remains chairman of Lotte today, though the group has spent years trying to shed its reputation as a case study in chaebol dysfunction.

What This Story Actually Tells You

It's tempting to read this as just tabloid drama, but it's a genuine lesson in how family conglomerates work — or don't. Complex cross-shareholding structures that were designed to keep control inside one family can just as easily turn that same family against itself the moment there's no clear succession plan. A few things worth remembering next time you see a "chaebol scandal" headline out of Korea:

• Lotte's ownership was so tangled between Korean and Japanese entities that even insiders struggled to map who controlled what.
• The son who won the boardroom fight still ended up convicted of a crime tied to the very same empire he'd fought to control.
• A rift between brothers over one noodle company (Nongshim) foreshadowed an even bigger rift between another set of brothers over the whole conglomerate, decades later.

Next time you're eating Guylian chocolates or grabbing a coffee at a Lotte Mart, remember there's a decade of lawsuits, a jailed chairman, and a 97-year-old founder who died at odds with his own son sitting quietly behind that logo. Sources: - [Billionaire Family Feud: Founder Of South Korea's Lotte Group Demoted By Own Son - Forbes](https://www.forbes.com/sites/gracechung/2015/07/29/billionaire-family-feud-founder-of-south-koreas-lotte-group-demoted-by-own-son/) - [Shin vs. Shin: Lotte Family Feud Escalates as Patriarch Sues - Bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-08/lotte-family-feud-escalates-with-patriarch-suing-younger-son) - [Lotte: Billionaire boss jailed for 30 months for bribery in South Korea - CNN](https://money.cnn.com/2018/02/13/news/companies/lotte-chairman-prison-south-korea/index.html) - [Lotte Group founder Shin Kyuk-ho dies at 98 - CNN Business](https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/20/business/lotte-group-founder-shin-kyuk-ho-obituary)