Lotte Group founder's mistress

Lotte Group hosted a beauty pageant called Miss Lotte in the 1970s and 80s. It was originally intended to select the company’s commercial models, but it also served as the gateway to become actresses. Top actresses such as Won Mi-kyung, Lee Mi-sook, Chae Shi-ra and Lee Mi-yeon first let their face known to the world at the pageant. The first Miss Lotte in 1977 was given to Seo Mi-kyung, an 18-year-old girl who worked as a teenage actress. She was the first model of the commercial of “Lotte Chewing Gum,” which is still familiar to many Koreans.

Seo appeared in movies and television series, but suddenly disappeared in the entertainment community in 1981. The enigma was solved by the news that she gave birth to a daughter of Shin Kyuk-ho, founder of Lotte Group. Shin cherished his daughter, Shin Yu-mi, whom he got at age 61, and added her to his family register. Seo, the “hidden woman” of the leader of Korea’s fifth largest conglomerate was also called “Lotte’s mistress.”

Yuwon Industrial and Yugi Development, which Shin set up for Seo and his daughter, are the cream of the crop in Lotte’s dining business portfolio. Yugyeong, a bibimbap restaurant, Yuwonjeong, a cold buckwheat noodle restaurant, and Hyangli, a Japanese noodle restaurant, all of which operate in Lotte Department Store, are related to Seo and her daughter. The companies and stores related to them mostly have “Yu” in the name, naming after his daughter’s name “Yu-mi.” When an employee responsible for dining in Lotte Department Store is changed, he or she had to comply with the unwritten law of handing over the “secret royal family tree” to his or her successor.

Prosecutors detected that Shin allegedly evaded a transfer income tax and a gift tax worth around 600 billion won (544.9 million U.S. dollars) when he handed over his six percent stake in Lotte Holdings Japan, which was held in other person’s name from 2005 to 2010, to Seo and her daughter. Apart from the controversy over an ethical issue, it is understandable that Shin cherished Seo, who had to live as the woman of the group founder in the shadow since the early 20s and his daughter who he got when he was over 60. However, if he committed crime like tax evasion when he handed over a stake in a company or management right of a store in a department store, legal judgement would be inevitable.