Kim Woo-choong

Kim Woo-choong (19 December 1936 to 9 December 2019) was a South Korean businessman who founded Daewoo Group and chaired it until its collapse in 1999. Born in Daegu, the son of a school teacher turned provincial governor who was taken to North Korea when Kim was a teenager, he sold newspapers and other goods as a boy and later took a Bachelor of Economics at Yonsei University in Seoul. In 1967 he began a small textiles trading corporation with five associates and grew the renamed Daewoo Group by using borrowed money to buy near-bankrupt companies, so that by the 1980s it ranked as the third-largest South Korean chaebol. The group went bankrupt in 1999 with debts of about US$50 billion; Kim fled abroad, returned in 2005, and in 2006 was sentenced to ten years for embezzlement and accounting fraud, a term later reduced, before he was pardoned on 30 December 2007. His 1989 book of autobiographical essays for young people sold more than a million copies within six months.