At 3:00 P.M., a rowdy mob of shareholders burst into the lobby of the
National Pension Service on rumors that it had voted to support the merger
—though the accusation was not yet proven. They delivered an angry
petition.
“If this is for the ‘national good,’ then why are all these shares being
used to aid Samsung’s ruling family?” the petition read. “This constitutes
professional negligence. For NPS to go along with this without objective
evidence to back them up constitutes abuse of authority. They will answer
to this. If there was outside pressure involved in the decision, make a
conscientious confession now and reverse the decision before it’s too late.”
“The NPS,” the petition argued sarcastically, “should be renamed the
Samsung Pension Fund so that the country understands why they are paying
the pension.”
It was now two days before the vote.
“How dare they attack Samsung while our Chairman is bedridden and
ill!” declared a small shareholder, according to one story circulating in the
coffee shops in the city’s financial district. According to reports, the
investor marched into the lobby of the Samsung C&T headquarters,
offering to entrust the company with his shares.
The gossip mill was abuzz with chatter and innuendo as the vote
deciding the future of the Republic of Samsung approached. It was in one
coffee shop that I first met the Korean shareholding activist who went by
the pen name “Jim Rogers” but whose real name was Kang Dong-oh.
Jim Rogers was leading a group of minority shareholders frustrated with
Samsung’s treatment of them. Until recently, Samsung and major
corporations like it, he claimed, had called these small stock traders “ants”
who could easily be squashed. Now, the shareholders told me, they were
binding together in “solidarity.” Yet almost none of them wanted to be
named, for fear of angering Samsung.
“I’ve studied the pension service,” Jim Rogers told me. “I don’t think the
merger will go through. The math doesn’t add up. They’re going to reject
it.” Rogers pored over the scenarios and the numbers at the table. Samsung
was likely to lose, he concluded, unless the pension fund could be
convinced to act against its own interests.
It was the day before the vote. In a last-minute hearing, the Seoul High
Court turned down Elliott’s appeal to stop Samsung’s shareholder vote.
On the day of the vote, July 17, 2015, I spent the early morning at the