Uncle Lee Jeonghwan (1)
The office of the victims’ emergency response committee.
Cho Miyeon walked in with her head tilted in puzzlement.
Strictly speaking, the reporter was not a victim herself. Her father, however, served as the victims’ representative—having poured his entire retirement severance into Yuseong corporate bonds and watched it vanish. She had been coming to the office to help while also covering the financial fraud story. That was how she had ended up taking Lee Jaseung’s call.
“Is this guy insane?”
As Cho Miyeon sat down still shaking her head, a female staffer in the office asked, “Something happen?”
“Just listen to this. Yesterday some guy claiming to be from the Yuseong family calls me out of nowhere and suddenly wants to meet?”
“……What?”
The startled staffer unconsciously glanced toward the inner office. Cho Miyeon failed to notice and kept pouring out the story.
“So I cussed him out and hung up, and he calls right back. Says he’ll help us with the class-action lawsuit.”
“So what did you do?”
“Blocked him, obviously. No way it was real. Had to be some impostor, right? Who pretends to be the perpetrator and calls the victims’ office? Absolute psycho. Wait—should I write an article about this?”
“Uh, well, about that……”
“I’ll make the headline pop. [Shock! Perpetrator Impersonator Stalks Yuseong Securities Victims……] What do you think? Clicks will go through the roof, right?”
The staffer’s throat bobbed. A man with a cool, sharp impression flashed through her mind. He had come about the class action, so she had assumed he was a lawyer—but then……
“That person wouldn’t have introduced himself as Lee Jaseung, would he?”
Cho Miyeon’s eyes went wide. “The impostor claimed to be Lee Jaseung, yeah, but how did you know?”
“Well……”
The staffer turned toward the firmly closed door. Cho Miyeon followed her gaze.
“……He’s already here.”
Bang!
The door slammed open as Cho Miyeon stormed in, furious.
“Hey. So you really are from the Yuseong family? What kind of face does a Yuseong heir wear walking into this place?”
Lee Jaseung slowly turned his head to regard her. The résumé he had seen at the café came back to him.
Reporter for a small online paper. Helping her father, the victims’ representative, while covering the story. I even read a couple of her pieces.
She writes a damn entertaining article.
She had a knack for titles you simply could not scroll past without clicking.
Lee Jaseung gestured toward a chair. “Please, sit. You didn’t seem to believe me over the phone, so I came in person. If I help you, the class action will move much faster.”
“Wow. So it was real.”
Cho Miyeon let out a hollow laugh of pure disbelief. “You honestly think you can help us? Seriously?”
“Well. At least that staffer seems to think so. Miss, wouldn’t you agree?”
“Excuse me?”
Suddenly put on the spot, the female employee answered with a flustered face.
“You lost twenty million won, correct? If I assist with the class action, would you accept the help?”
She hesitated, then gave a reluctant nod. Lee Jaseung turned back to Cho Miyeon as if to say, See?
“Unbelievable.”
Cho Miyeon was left speechless. He wasn’t even using their desperation as a hostage to force the help on them. She crossed her arms.
“So how exactly are you planning to help? And do you really think it would even help? If word gets out that a Yuseong family member assisted the victims’ class action against Yuseong……”
“It could compromise the purity of the lawsuit?”
Cho Miyeon froze. He had pinpointed the exact weak point.
“You knew that and still made the offer? Receiving help from the Yuseong family in a class action suing the Yuseong Group? They’ll seize on that in a heartbeat.”
“No need to worry that far. I simply intend to help you raise your voices.”
Cho Miyeon looked puzzled. “What does that mean?”
“There are already forty thousand victims. With the financial scandal drawing every eye, this is the moment to launch the class action as quickly as possible.”
Lee Jaseung swept a glance around the office and continued.
“At this slapdash pace it will take a full year. By then public interest will have gone cold. Right now is when the victims’ voices will carry farthest.”
“……”
He was exactly right. As a reporter herself, Cho Miyeon knew it well—this was the absolute best window to move public opinion.
“I’ll connect you with Samwoo Law Firm.”
“Samwoo? They’re……”
“Yes. The joint legal counsel for the creditors’ group. I’m telling you to join hands with the creditors.”
Cho Miyeon swallowed hard. She saw his intent at once.
“You’re saying we should combine the institutional investors’ massive damages with the individual investors’ massive numbers.”
“You’ll gain not only public opinion but political pressure as well. The lawsuit will accelerate considerably.”
Every word was correct. Still she hesitated, unable to decide easily.
He’s still a Yuseong. Can I trust him?
“How do I know you’re not just trying to sabotage the suit?”
“Ah. Sabotage.”
As if he had heard a ridiculous joke, Lee Jaseung gave a short, incredulous laugh. The open mockery made Cho Miyeon’s face flush, but she pressed on.
“You could collude with the creditors, plant an insider to obstruct us, leak our information back to Yuseong. My suspicion isn’t completely unreasonable.”
Her eyes were thick with wariness. Lee Jaseung, however, remained perfectly at ease.
“You needn’t worry about that. If I truly intended to sabotage you, I would do it with far more sophistication than this.”
He smiled faintly at her stunned expression and rose. He had delivered the message; what she needed now was time to think. If she had working eyes, she would soon see what the best choice was.
“Think it over.”
After Lee Jaseung left, Cho Miyeon sank into deep thought. She turned to the staffer beside her.
“Do not breathe a word that he was here. Especially not to my dad. He’ll completely flip. Understood?”
The staffer nodded shrewdly, then asked carefully, “Reporter Cho…… should we take his offer?”
“I don’t know. I just can’t trust him.”
“What if Samwoo deliberately steers the case toward defeat?”
That was precisely the point Cho Miyeon had been wrestling with—yet the possibility was essentially zero.
“A firm that size deliberately losing a case makes no sense. They’re already counsel for the creditors. They’re already cherry-picking only the cases with high win rates; tanking an open-and-shut fraud case would destroy their reputation.”
She thought of Lee Jaseung. A man like a cold, straight line. The help he offered kept the same clean boundary as his manner—just enough Yuseong assistance that it would not become a problem, yet enough for the victims to raise their voices properly. Within the range of what he could provide, there was simply no better solution.
……He might not be a bad person after all.
Cho Miyeon exhaled a long breath and firmed her resolve. She still could not fully trust him, but under the circumstances accepting the help was the best move available.
A few days later.
News that the creditors’ group and the victims’ emergency response committee had formed an alliance struck Yuseong Group like a thunderbolt.
Chairman Lee Jeonghwan’s residence.
The chief secretary, having raced over in a panic, burst into the study. Lee Jeonghwan was already watching the news.
Lee Jeonghwan turned to the secretary with a smile. “You’re here.”
“Chairman……”
“My nephew is quite the cunning one. He knows exactly when to stab you in the back.”
Lee Jeonghwan picked up the remote and switched off the television. In the silence that settled over the study after the anchor’s voice vanished, individual victims’ stories began flooding the press—retirees who had lost their nest eggs, families whose education funds had evaporated. Public opinion was concentrating every ounce of blame on Yuseong Group, and especially on Lee Jeonghwan himself.
The chief secretary spoke carefully. “The creditors now have public opinion at their backs. Politics will move next. And if that happens……”
“I could be arrested.”
Lee Jeonghwan was still free on a non-custodial indictment. But once the victims began to organize in earnest, the prosecutors would press the investigation far harder.
“Which brings me to this. The creditors’ representative contacted us.”
“That illegitimate son?”
Lee Jeonghwan’s brow furrowed. Seo Minjae—the illegitimate heir of Seongseong Securities. After successfully executing the investment Lee Jaseung had commissioned, he had rocketed upward and was now strutting about inside the creditors’ group.
This too is my nephew’s handiwork, no doubt.
Astonishingly, his dear nephew never stepped into the spotlight; he simply occupied every key stakeholder with exquisite precision.
“What did he say?”
“If we accept the sale of Yuseong Steel, they will halt the public-opinion offensive.”
“Insolent little bastard. As if I weren’t already planning to sell when the time was right.”
Displeasure was written all over Lee Jeonghwan’s face as he continued. “But not now. You know this as well as I do—Yuseong Steel is no ordinary subsidiary.”
He opened a desk drawer and drew out the topmost document.
“You remember this?”
“Yes, Chairman. I drafted it myself.”
It was the escape plan drawn up the moment Yuseong Group began to teeter—an ultra-classified matter known only to Lee Jeonghwan and his closest aide, the chief secretary.
“Yuseong Steel was the lifeboat.”
Lee Jeonghwan had funneled every personal asset that could be seized into Yuseong Steel. The mansion he currently lived in, the golf courses he cherished—everything had been transferred under its umbrella. Protect Yuseong Steel alone and everything would be protected.
“Afterward I intended to buy the lifeboat back with the slush funds.”
Under pressure, Lee Jeonghwan would have no choice but to sell Yuseong Steel at a bargain price to some foreign firm. In truth that firm would already hold his slush money. Outwardly it would look as though he had lost everything; in reality he would merely have moved the assets to a back pocket.
The problem was—
“Before we can even board the lifeboat, Jaseung is trying to snatch it away. How is the slush-fund preparation progressing?”
“We still need more time. At least another month.”
“And if Yuseong Steel enters court receivership in the meantime?”
Court receivership would freeze the creditors’ ability to exercise their rights. Immediate pressure could be blocked. Yet the secretary hesitated.
“There is no guarantee the court will side with us.”
“We have no choice. Everything carries risk right now. Open negotiations with the court. Tell them I will resign the chairmanship and replace the entire management team. In return, arrange for the newly appointed executives to be named the court-appointed receivers.”
“Understood.”
Lee Jeonghwan knew the truth, however. This was only a delaying tactic. If Jaseung pressed harder, stopgap measures would reach their limit.
In the end he would have to meet the architect of this board himself.
“I believe it is time I saw my nephew.”
This work is a work of fiction. All characters, groups, place names, and events appearing herein are entirely fictitious and bear no relation to any real persons or entities. Specialized knowledge described has been restructured and adapted for narrative purposes and may differ from actual information.