South Korea's corporate watchdog chief plans to meet heads of the country's top 10 conglomerates, such as Samsung and Hyundai Motor, next month to hear their efforts to improve murky governance structures, sources said Friday.
According to the sources, Kim Sang-jo, chairman of the Fair Trade Commission, is planning to hold a meeting with businessmen on May 10, which would be the third of its kind since his inauguration in May 2017.
His planned meeting will come as family-controlled business groups, widely known as chaebol here, have been under pressure to change their ownership structures.
Kim has said that reforming family-controlled business groups and spreading fair business practices are key to so-called economic democratization in Asia's fourth-largest economy.
The FTC chief has stressed that creating a level playing field for small and medium-sized companies is very important here.
In March of this year, a slew of large conglomerates, such as Hyundai Motor Group, unveiled plans to streamline their circular cross-shareholding structure through business spinoffs and mergers among affiliates amid growing pressure to make changes.
One of the key policy objectives for the Moon Jae-in government is ensuring and accelerating economic democratization, a process that calls for stepped up efforts to create new, quality jobs -- another key election pledge of Moon -- as well as greater support for the socially and economically marginalized population.
Kim said reforming chaebol is the starting point for economic democratization, and that without improving fair business practices, it cannot be achieved. (Yonhap)