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The family of the late Samsung patriarch Lee Kun-hee has pledged billions of dollars in health care expenses and art donations and has pledged to pay $ 11 billion in one of the world’s largest estate tax bills .
Following Lee’s death in October, South Korea’s most powerful family received six months to inform tax officials how they would treat the property of the richest man in the country, including a 60% inheritance tax bill. his fortune of $ 20 billion.
In a rare public statement, the family on Wednesday announced a set of philanthropic donations, including hundreds of millions of dollars for the treatment of childhood cancer, an infectious disease hospital and vaccine research.
The family will also donate Lee’s cache of 23,000 works of art and antiques in South Korean museums. The personal collection includes masterpieces by Salvador Dalí, Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso, as well as famous Korean artists such as Park Soo-keun, Lee Jung-seop and Kim Whan-ki.
The Samsung group, which began trading dried fish and vegetables in the 1930s when Japan ruled the Korean peninsula, is one of the world’s leading producers of chips and smartphones among countless electronic devices and components.
Lee was the second-generation Samsung president he ran the company radical transformation into a global technological power.
The donations, according to the family, “will maintain their legacy and contribute to the creation of a better society.”
The family also pledged to pay in full the more of Won12tn ($ 11 billion) in inheritance-related taxes. Taxes will be paid in six installments over a five-year period, they said.
“Our duty and civic responsibility is to pay all taxes,” they said, noting that the payment of inheritance tax is one of the largest in Korea and globally, equivalent to three or four times the [South Korean] the total government revenue from property taxes last year ”.
No further details were provided.
The public image of the family has been tarnished by the imprisonment in January of Lee Jae-yong, son of the late president who heads Samsung, for bribery related to his succession.
According to local analysts and people familiar with the situation, the family planned to pay most of the bill initially through bank loans backed by their own holdings, as well as cash from higher dividend payments from Samsung group units. Lee Kun-hee’s ownership includes shares of Samsung Electronics, as well as smaller companies such as Samsung Life Insurance and Samsung C&T.
Park Sang-in, a professor of economics at Seoul National University, said the family did not appear to have reached an agreement on how to split the inherited stocks due to Lee Jae-yong’s imprisonment.
Analysts have not ruled out that the Lee family he might have to divest some of its stakes in Samsung companies, a prospect that could present rare opportunities for outsiders to snatch views from the conglomerate.
Still, control of Samsung Electronics, the crown jewel of the family business empire, is expected to continue with Lee Jae-yong.
“There will be no big problems to pay the bill in installments. They can increase dividend payments from Samsung companies, take out bank loans with their holdings as collateral and sell some holdings in smaller companies, which will not affect their control over large units, ”said the head of a local broker who asked not to be appointed.
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