South Korea’s financial regulator yesterday said that it is investigating possible insider trading by Samsung executives related to a contentious takeover deal.
Kim Hong-sik, director of the capital markets investigation unit at the South Korean Financial Services Commission, said the nation’s stock exchange reported the suspected insider trading or share manipulation.
South Korea’s Yonhap News reported that nine Samsung executives purchased as much as 50 billion won (US$43 million) of Cheil Industries Inc stock before Samsung announced a deal to combine Cheil and another Samsung company in May.
Shares of Cheil, which has members of Samsung’s founding Lee family as majority shareholders, surged after the announcement.
Kim said the investigation was related to the deal, but declined to discuss other details because the matter was under investigation.
In a statement, Samsung described the investigation as being in its “early stage.”
“We are going to wait until the authorities conclude their investigation,” it said.
The Cheil Industries and Samsung C&T Corp deal was contested by some shareholders of Samsung C&T who questioned its fairness.
Samsung C&T narrowly won a shareholder vote in July, allowing the transaction to go ahead.
The combined entity has Samsung Group’s vice chairman Lee Jae-yong as the majority shareholder giving him effective control of its 4 percent stake in Samsung Electronics Co, the Samsung conglomerate’s crown jewel.
The most outspoken opponent of the deal was US hedge fund Elliott Associates LP, which eventually lost its legal fight to stop Samsung from combining the two companies.
Elliott argued the takeover unfairly benefited Samsung’s founding family and other shareholders in Cheil at the cost of shareholders in Samsung C&T.
The fight between Elliott and Samsung drew international attention as Samsung’s all-out campaign was at one point criticized by Jewish organizations for depicting Elliott’s founder as a ravenous, big-beaked vulture.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
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Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day