My Kingdom for a Horse
“THE PRESIDENT WOULD LIKE to see you.”
It was September 15, 2014, ten months before Samsung pushed through
its merger. Jay Lee was in Daegu at a gathering of executives with South
Korea’s president. The president’s aide pulled him aside and quietly
informed him of the president’s wishes, Jay would later testify in court.
Jay was ushered into a room where the president, Madame Park Geun-
hye, awaited him.
It was a meeting of scions. Both Jay and President Park came from
families that had built South Korea into an economic power. President Park
was the daughter of South Korea’s former nation-building dictator, Park
Chung-hee, the man whose ideas became the driving engines of South
Korea’s growth. When she was a teenager, an assassin’s bullet intended for
her father instead hit and killed her mother in an auditorium. Her father
was shot dead by his intelligence chief in 1979.
When asked why she never married, President Park would answer, “I
am married to the nation and its citizens.”
“How is Chairman Lee Kun-hee’s health?” she asked Lee, about his
bedridden father. After the pleasantries, she got to the point.
“I ask that Samsung take charge of the operation of the Korea
Equestrian Foundation. In the run up to the Olympics, buy the competitors
good horses and help with their field training.” In South Korea,
corporations traditionally helped the government and vice versa—even if it
meant buying the South Korean equestrian team horses for the Olympics,
or whatever else the state felt was needed.
Jay acquiesced, and Samsung initiated its sponsorship of the South
Korean equestrian team. He next met the president at her official residence,