An Effortlessly Easy Defense (3)
Kwon Seong-gyun stared blankly at the ceiling as if dazed from the successive critical blows I had landed. Then he muttered, “So you’re saying QS Life Insurance will vote in favor of appointing President Choi Sang-seok?”
Baek Eun-deok blinked, as though wondering what on earth Seong-gyun had been listening to during the entire explanation. “Yes. That is correct.”
Seong-gyun’s eyes darted restlessly across the ceiling as he calculated something, then he lowered his head and glared at me. “The game isn’t over yet.”
I almost laughed. It wasn’t difficult to understand what he meant. He was pinning his last hope on Kim Majin, who had yet to arrive. If Kim Majin exercised the 18.2 percent stake she held as Kwon Je-gyun’s proxy, combined with the roughly 12 percent Seong-gyun and QS Electronics had frantically purchased, plus the shares he had forced through proxy forms, and if he could sway all the floating shareholders on the day of the general meeting, there was still a sliver of a chance. As with most of these unnecessarily convoluted calculations, the result was wrong. Seong-gyun’s chance of blocking the appointment of President Choi Sang-seok at Monday’s shareholders’ meeting was exactly zero.
For one thing, the idea that he could deliver a dazzling presentation on the day of the meeting and sweep up all the floating votes was absurd. There would be at least several hundred shareholders in attendance. How was he supposed to make them all agree on a single opinion? Moreover, the general sentiment among minority shareholders was already heavily in favor of President Choi Sang-seok. Ironically, Seong-gyun himself was responsible for that. The moment the appointment was announced, the stock price had soared, and shareholders had no reason to dislike that.
The strike led by Executive Director Yang Gu-hyeon, which Seong-gyun had intended to use as bait for minority shareholders, had already been neatly handled internally by President Choi Sang-seok, who had been forewarned by me. According to the message I received last week, Yang Gu-hyeon had been swiftly placed on standby and the fact had been announced to all the regional factories, rendering him powerless. Furthermore, at Monday’s shareholders’ meeting, President Choi Sang-seok planned to announce a restructuring plan that would increase dividends—the very thing shareholders loved most. Even if every shareholder had exactly one vote, like electing a politician, this was a game President Choi Sang-seok could never lose. How many shareholders would dislike a CEO who raises the stock price and pays out generous dividends?
And just then, the daily judge who would deliver the death sentence to Seong-gyun’s absurd calculations entered the headquarters director’s office.
* * *
Seong-gyun had only been able to entertain such calculations because he assumed Kim Majin would side with him. That same Kim Majin had called me that morning in a voice that sounded ready to burst into tears. When I answered, her first words were: “I’ll vote in favor of appointing President Choi Sang-seok.”
Until recently she had been leaning toward abstaining, so I asked why she had changed her mind. It turned out Seong-gyun had caused trouble. Realizing that directly targeting Kim Majin, who currently held the voting rights, wasn’t yielding results, he had tried an indirect route. He had been visiting Kwon Je-gyun’s closed ward almost daily, begging Kim Majin to persuade her husband to vote against the appointment. Whether intentional or not, during those visits he had made numerous remarks that wounded Je-gyun’s pride as a man. Comments like how a head of household should have some dignity instead of handing over voting rights and lying around like a wreck, or asking when he had become the kind of pathetic man who let his wife control him. Even if the line was dangerously close to being crossed, such words between brothers-in-law in private might not have been entirely strange. The real problem began with the fact that Je-gyun was a genuine patient diagnosed with intermittent explosive disorder by both the hospital and the court.
A person capable of normal judgment wouldn’t have relayed those words to his wife. Unfortunately, Je-gyun was officially recognized as abnormal by both the hospital and the court. Feeling deeply humiliated by Seong-gyun’s words, he unleashed his anger not only on Seong-gyun but also on Kim Majin when she came to visit later. He even exaggerated what Seong-gyun had said and screamed at the top of his lungs about how pathetic a man he had become because of Kim Majin. The nurses in the closed ward tried to calm him down, but he pushed them aside and even struck Kim Majin.
Kim Majin recounted the events in a sobbing voice and added, “Because of that, my husband is now locked in a solitary room at the hospital. Visits aren’t allowed either. I can understand that he’s sick, but you, who know our family situation, shouldn’t have provoked him like that. To pull such an extreme stunt… Seong-gyun must have been terrified of losing QS Food.”
“Seong-gyun hyung made a serious mistake.”
“Yes. As you advised last time, I was planning to abstain at the QS Food shareholders’ meeting since it seemed like a matter between you and the young master. But now that he’s interfering in our family affairs like this, I can’t hold back anymore.”
“I’d be grateful if you supported the appointment of President Choi Sang-seok. However, since this involves family emotions, it might become quite complicated if it comes up at the shareholders’ meeting. Could we meet this evening—Seong-gyun hyung, you, and me?”
“Understood.”
* * *
Thus, Kim Majin, whom I had deliberately summoned thirty minutes after Seong-gyun, appeared in the headquarters director’s office. Huh? She had a bandage on her left cheek. It looked like she had been scratched by fingernails when Je-gyun struck her. Someone was far more flustered by the sight than I was. Seong-gyun rose from his seat, his eyes fixed on Kim Majin’s face. “Sister-in-law, you’re here? You seem to have been injured.”
Click, click. Kim Majin deliberately made the sound of her high heels as she walked to the empty seat across from Seong-gyun and folded her arms. “I’ll just say I was hurt by my brother-in-law.”
“What? By me?”
At Seong-gyun’s flustered question, Kim Majin raised her chin in a manner completely unlike her usual self and pointed at the chair Seong-gyun had just been sitting in. “Are you going to stand while listening? It makes me uncomfortable, so would you mind sitting down?”
“Ah, yes.”
Seong-gyun hurriedly took his seat, pretending to obey, and Kim Majin relayed to him exactly what she had told me that morning, her voice filled with anger. She ended with a warning. “Don’t ever think about visiting my husband again. I’ve already told the hospital not to accept any visit requests from you as a guardian. If you try to interfere in our family matters like this again, I won’t stay quiet.”
Wow. She had come armed with real venom. At Kim Majin’s firm words, Seong-gyun lowered his head. “I’m sorry. I was too thoughtless. As you said, nothing like this will ever happen again. Since this matter has already passed, could you perhaps show some leniency just for the QS Food shareholders’ meeting the day after tomorrow? It would be troublesome for you to attend in person, so if you could simply sign the proxy form, I’ll handle the rest.”
Ha. Kim Majin let out a rough sigh, her arms still folded, and turned her gaze from Seong-gyun to the wall of the office as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Already passed? My wound hasn’t even healed yet, and you say that? I’ve already made up my mind about the appointment of the new CEO of QS Food. I’ll attend the extraordinary shareholders’ meeting in person and vote in favor.”
The defeat was declared in such a definitive tone that Seong-gyun couldn’t lift his head, as though he had been struck by a hammer. With this, the shares that had already committed to voting in favor of President Choi Sang-seok’s appointment exceeded the magical 51 percent threshold needed for victory at the shareholders’ meeting. No matter how many votes Seong-gyun gathered on the day, no matter how many abstentions there were, he could never win. The calculations of victory probability had surely vanished from Seong-gyun’s bowed head. Instead, another, more despairing calculation was now running through his mind.
According to our estimates, the amount Seong-gyun had spent buying up QS Food shares was a little over 100 billion won. That figure only accounted for the newly acquired shares by Kwon Seong-gyun personally, QS Electronics, and QS Display over the past two weeks. There were likely additional shares purchased through other affiliates under his influence or under nominee names, so we would have to add a little more. On top of that, there were transportation and entertainment expenses spent obtaining proxy forms from minority shareholders who had no intention of selling, as well as internal backlash from assigning employees of his own affiliates to collect those proxies—costs that couldn’t be precisely quantified. Adding everything up, the total cost Seong-gyun had poured into winning this QS Food shareholders’ meeting was probably around 1.5 to 2 times 100 billion won. What was he supposed to do now that he had wasted such precious ammunition—ammunition he had even lost the presidency of QS Electronics to accumulate? It wasn’t a small amount. If he was going to waste it anyway, wouldn’t it have been better spent on something worthwhile? Helping the underprivileged, or giving it to me, perhaps?
After keeping his head bowed for a long time, Seong-gyun finally stood up. I glanced down and caught an unexpected sight. His knees were slightly protruding forward, trembling violently. Had he actually been considering kneeling in front of Kim Majin? If Baek Eun-deok and I hadn’t been present, he might really have done it.
“I’m sorry, sister-in-law. I’ve committed a grave discourtesy.”
Apparently unable to bring himself to actually kneel, Seong-gyun left those words behind and walked out of the headquarters director’s office.
* * *
And so, on the following Monday, at the extraordinary shareholders’ meeting of QS Food, President Choi Sang-seok was appointed by an overwhelming margin. Excluding abstentions, the ratio of votes in favor to against reached a staggering 9:1. That same week, shareholders’ meetings were scheduled one after another to confirm the appointments of new CEOs for the thirteen affiliates decided at the previous presidents’ meeting. As a result, the Central Management Headquarters—particularly the headquarters director’s office—was extremely busy, and the busiest person of all was me, sitting at the very top.
Fortunately, no special variables arose at the other shareholders’ meetings either, and all the CEOs were appointed exactly as I had drafted at the presidents’ meeting. There was one amusing incident, however. Kwak Hee-yeon, the former CEO of QS Publishing who had been completely ousted, sent a poem written in Chinese characters to the Central Management Headquarters in the form of a petition. Although I hadn’t studied Chinese characters separately, I had become familiar with them while studying law. So I managed to decipher it, more or less:
“Liu, Guan, and Zhang formed their oath in the Peach Garden and fulfilled the bond of brotherhood without sharing blood. How, then, could someone forsake a brother with whom he shares blood?”
By “someone,” she meant me, and by “brothers,” she meant Seong-gyun and Je-gyun. So what? What a strange woman.