Biography | 이재용 Lee Jae-yong — Executive Chairman, 27 October 2022

For eight years the title and the job had not matched. Lee Jae-yong had been running Samsung Electronics in practice since his father's heart attack on 10 May 2014. The board only voted him Executive Chairman on 27 October 2022.

Samsung's own global newsroom published the appointment the same day. The Board of Directors approved a recommendation from independent director and board chairman Han-Jo Kim.

The Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Associated Press all dated the vote to that Thursday. There was no inaugural ceremony.

The company's Seoul office complex — Samsung Town, 11 Seocho-daero 74-gil, Seocho-gu — is the public building attached to a Seoul board meeting. The towers went up between 2004 and 2008. They are not a private house and not a current daily-route pin.

The vote closed a legal interval the company itself had treated as unfinished business. Lee had been convicted in 2017, released on parole in 2021, and pardoned in August 2022. Those are court and presidential record, not color for this pin.

His father, Lee Kun-hee, had died in October 2020. The chairmanship had sat vacant.

Kyunghyang Shinmun noted the same day that thirty-one years had passed since the 1991 Suwon join. That arithmetic is the only career span this memory needs.

A visitor to Seocho sees the three office towers from the Gangnam streets. The boardroom is not a public gallery. The fact that belongs on the pavement is the date and the title: 27 October 2022, Executive Chairman, voted here.

Photo: Korean Broadcasting System, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (portrait, 2016).