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The chaos at SM Entertainment escalates after its co-CEO Lee Sung Soo released a video where he exposes the agency’s founder Lee Soo Man of wrongdoing. He claimed that Soo Man is slowly destroying the company because of his personal greed.
He added that SM Entertainment’s founder also forced aespa girl group to put lyrics about sustainability in their songs but he has been evading taxes all along. Lee Sung Soo alleged that Lee Soo Man is systematically dodging tax payments through a private company that he also established overseas.
"Since last year, Lee Soo-man has been pitching a K-pop festival with the theme idea of planting trees,” the co-CEO said in the video. "He suddenly started rooting for sustainability and ordered aespa, whose concept is so well laid-out and clear, to sing a song with the concept of planting trees. We, the co-CEOs could not stand by the content that no one agreed with and decided to cancel it for aespa's sake."
The video which has since been viewed by thousands of people was uploaded by Lee Sung Soo on his own YouTube channel on Thursday, Feb. 16. As per Korea Joongang Daily, the co-CEO further revealed that Lee Soo Man created CT Planning Limited (CTP) in 2019 and it is based in Hong Kong.
He said this production firm was built with the intention of avoiding taxes. The SME founder was also seeking to expand CTP’s businesses to manage all of the SM artists' music activities outside of South Korea.
The business arrangement in CTP is said to be similar to Soo Man’s other private firm called Like Planning which has been collecting up to six percent of SME’s total annual revenue and labeling this collection as production fees. Through this process, he has been getting KRW 140 billion or about $109 million over the course of 20 years.
One of the most scandalous claims is that Lee Soo Man’s ultimate goal for doing all of these is to acquire real estate overseas and build casinos where marijuana is legal. He will be taking advantage of K-pop’s popularity to launch and get the business going.
Finally, Lee Sung Soo is the nephew of the SME founder’s late wife. He has been CEO since 2020 but joined the entertainment firm fin 2005 as a part of the artist and repertoire (A&R) team.
