SEOUL: Brian Kim’s rise was sensational: The man who as a boy shared a room with seven family members overtook Samsung Group heir Jay Y Lee to become South Korea’s richest person.First were the monopoly concerns over his messaging giant Kakao as the country instituted stricter measures to avoid such practices. Then came a backlash as top executives sold shares soon after a unit’s successful public offering.
Kim, who rose from extreme poverty and was the first of his siblings to attend college, began Kakao’s predecessor in 2006 and launched its massively successful mobile messaging app KakaoTalk four years later. The company then started expanding into online banking, shopping, gaming and ride-hailing, with the COVID-19 pandemic providing another boost as fewer in-person interactions drove traffic to Kakao’s apps.
“Recently, we poignantly reflected on not realizing the social responsibility as we were elated with the growth of subsidiaries,” Kim said at a parliament hearing in October. “As a company that has received public support, we will make excruciating efforts to go back to remembering how we were when we first started.”
The civic group that reported Kim to the police accused him of manipulating accounts to evade capital-gains taxes from the merger of Kakao and portal site Daum in 2014. In 2019, the prosecutor’s office of the Seoul Central District Court dropped a previous accusation around the same issue, the group said.
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