as a protest took place outside while we dined on spicy chilled noodles,
pumpkin, and salad.
It had taken me months to get the interview. Choi Kwang kept away
from the media. He insisted to me that as an administrator he hadn’t
meddled in the pension service’s voting decision, nor had he been a part of
the vote in any way. But as the pension service’s top leader, he had his own
opinion of Samsung and its merger, which he was overwhelmingly in favor
of.
“I thought the merger would be unanimously approved....I was
surprised that there were some people who didn’t approve, who weren’t in
favor of the merger.
“Right now, I think we lost a lot of money,” he told me. But he said that
in “six or ten years,” the merger would be in the retirement body’s interests.
“What would be the benefit of the merger, say, ten years down the
road?” I asked.
“Nobody knows.”