SM Entertainment's co-CEO Lee Sung-soo slams founder Lee Soo-man in video

K-pop

Published: 16 Feb. 2023, 10:15

SM Entertainment's co-CEO Lee Sung-soo slams founder Lee Soo-man in video

Lee Soo-man, founder of SM Entertainment, at a forum held on Feb. 14 at the Seoul Grand Hyatt Hotel in central Seoul [YONHAP]

SM Entertainment's founder Lee Soo-man has been ruining the K-pop agency with his personal greed, the company's co-CEO Lee Sung-soo argued in a statement uploaded on his YouTube channel on Thursday morning.

"We as members of SM Entertainment cannot stand by and watch the company being controlled by Lee Soo-man," he said in the video. "I wish to explain to you in detail why SM Entertainment has come to be in the state it is in now."

Lee Sung-soo, the nephew of Lee Soo-man's wife, has been holding the CEO position since 2020.

According to the CEO, Lee Soo-man founded a Hong Kong-based production company named CT Planning Limited in 2019 to evade taxes and has been seeking to expand that company's businesses to include all of SM artists' overseas music activities.

Lee Sung-soo claimed Lee Soo-man forced artists to publicly announce that he is important to the company and tried to manipulate staff, ordering the establishment of a team to sway an upcoming shareholders' meeting in his favor with a budget of more than 10 billion won ($7.8 million).

Lee Sung-su, co-CEO of SM Entertainment, released a statement through his YouTube channel on Thursday morning. [SCREEN CAPTURE]

"I am ashamed, I am wretched," Lee Sung-soo said. "We could no longer face the staff at SM, the fans, the artists and every shareholder who invested in this company."

Lee Soo-man's stubbornness has resulted in girl group aespa having to cancel its new album, the CEO said.

The girl group's new album was scheduled for release on Feb. 20, 2023 but was delayed due to Lee Soo-man's "greed and stubbornness" related to his real estate business and the production behind it, he said.

"Since last year, Lee Soo-man has been arguing for a K-pop festival headed by the idea of 'planting trees," he said. "He suddenly started rooting for sustainability [...] And he ordered aespa, whose concept is so well laid-out and clear, to sing a song with the idea of planting trees."

"The lyrics contained words such as 'Just sustainability, bringing down the temperature, co-habitation, Greenism,' which made aespa members so sad that they filled up with tears," he continued. "We co-CEOs could not stand by with a content that no one agreed with and decided to cancel it for aespa's sake."

The CEO finished the video by teasing a text and phone call with Bang Si-hyuk, founder and chairman of HYBE.

BY YOON SO-YEON [yoon.soyeon@joongang.co.kr]