Suicide jump of executive caught in industrial scandal

A SENIOR executive with South Korean industrial giant Hyundai, whose business spearheaded reconciliation efforts with North Korea but ended up tangled in debt and scandal, leapt to his death from his 12th-floor office window yesterday.

A caretaker found 54-year-old Chung Mong-hun’s body in shrubbery at Hyundai headquarters in central Seoul. At first he thought it was a slumbering drunk.

Chung was on trial on charges stemming from allegations that his company, Hyundai-Asan, helped former President Kim Dae-jung’s government secretly pay North Korea some €100 million to get Pyongyang to agree to a summit between the Koreas in 2000.

Both Hyundai and President Roh Moo-hyun bemoaned Chung’s death, and said they will continue to push for joint business ventures in communist North Korea.

Chung had left hurriedly scribbled notes for his family and Kim Yoon-kyu, his deputy, asking that they continue his North Korean projects and scatter his ashes over Diamond Mountain, a scenic resort where his company runs a tourism project.

He also asked them to forgive his “foolish act”, but did not elaborate.

“When I saw you today, I realised that you’ve gotten even prettier,” he said in a note to one of his two daughters. Chung also has a son.

At the end of his note for Kim, his closest aide, Chung showed his affection with a joke: “I really think you should give up your habit of winking too often.”

Described as shy yet extremely ambitious, Chung was once the “crown heir” of the vast Hyundai conglomerate which his father, Chung Ju-yung, built from scratch into South Korea’s largest business empire, engaged in everything from cars and ships to department stores and computer chips.

The fifth of the senior Chung’s eight sons, Mong-hun rose to the chairmanship in a highly unusual move in South Korea’s deeply Confucian corporate society, where the eldest son takes over the family’s business.

In a family feud in 2000, his elder brother Mong-koo broke away from the group, taking Hyundai Motor, South Korea’s top car firm, with him.

Hyundai Heavy Industries, the world’s largest shipbuilder, also broke away in state-driven corporate reforms aimed at breaking up South Korea’s family-controlled conglomerates.

Left with heavily indebted or only marginally profitable subsidiaries, Mong-hun put his hopes in North Korean projects which his father had initiated before his death in 2001.