A Seoul High Court has ordered SK Group Chairman Chey Tae-won to pay his ex-wife, Roh Soh-yeong, 944 billion won (about $644 million) in property division — cutting the previous award by nearly a third, in a ruling handed down Friday that closes out a near decade-long legal battle.

Chey, 65, shocked South Korea in 2015 when he publicly admitted in a three-page newspaper letter that he had fallen in love with another woman and fathered a child outside his marriage, declaring the relationship beyond repair. He quoted the opening line of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina in the letter. Roh is the daughter of the late South Korean president Roh Tae-woo.

The case has been through several rounds: a district court initially awarded Roh just 66.5 billion won in 2022, treating Chey's SK shares as separate property outside the marriage. An appeals court raised that dramatically to 1.38 trillion won (~$970 million) in 2024, ruling Chey's shares counted as marital assets and setting Roh's contribution at 35%. South Korea's Supreme Court then overturned that figure in October 2025, rejecting the inclusion of funds Roh's father allegedly funneled to Chey, and ordered a retrial.

Friday's retrial verdict set Roh's share of the contribution at one-third and Chey's at two-thirds, but crucially, the court largely valued Chey's SK Inc. shares as of April 2024 — before SK Hynix stock roughly quintupled amid the AI boom — rather than at the much higher price on the date retrial arguments concluded in June 2026. Had it used the later valuation, the settlement could have been significantly larger. The court did partially factor in the recent share price surge, but not to the extent Roh had sought. Roh keeps no ownership stake in SK Group itself; Chey retains all his shares and must cover her portion in cash.