Hana Financial Group Chairman Ham Young-joo (Hana Financial Group)
Shareholders of Hana Financial Group have officially elected Vice Chairman and sole chairman-nominee Ham Young-joo to lead the company for the next three years, the firm said Friday.
Ham’s nomination was supported by the majority of the shareholders at Hana including its largest shareholder the National Pension Service, which owns 9.19 percent in the banking group. Foreign stakeholders, owning a combined 67.53 percent, also voted for Ham, according to Hana. The NPS is Korea’s largest institutional investor.
Ham has now officially replaced former chairman Kim Jung-tai, who was at the helm of the group for a decade.
Following his nomination by the firm’s chairman recommendation committee on Feb.8, Ham has walked a rocky road towards Friday’s shareholders meeting, with two legal issues standing as hurdles in the way.
One was on the allegations that Ham had exercised his influence on a hiring request at Hana Bank in 2015, when he was CEO of Hana’s flagship lender from September 2015 to March 2019. The Seoul Western District Court on March 11 sided with Ham on the matter, clearing him of any wrongdoings in the hiring scandal.
But Ham wasn’t as lucky in other legal battle as a separate court, the Seoul Administrative Court on March 14 found the then-Hana Bank CEO guilty of failing to appropriately supervise the lender’s improper sales of derivatives-linked products. The products caused a nationwide fiasco in 2019 after investors saw huge losses.
The court decision, which upheld the financial authorities’ decision in 2020 to slap a “reprimand” warning – the third-highest level of the Financial Service’s Commission’s five-tier punishment system – on Ham, put him at risk of losing his nomination as Hana’s next chairman. The sanction bans the recipient from being hired to a new role in the financial sector for at least three years.
The air cleared for Ham when he swiftly filed an appeal against the ruling and a higher court on Thursday temporarily suspended the punishment by accepting an injunction. The injunction will remain in effect until 30 days after the court makes its decision, which allowed Ham to be voted as new chairman on Friday. A court date for the appeal has yet to be set.
Prior to Friday’s shareholders meeting, Institutional Shareholder Service, the world’s leading proxy advisor recommended shareholders to vote against Ham, citing his legal issues.
Shareholders on Friday also agreed to provide a retirement bonus worth 5 billion won ($4.1 million) for outgoing chairman Kim.
Ham, born in 1956 in rural South Chungcheong Province, is well-known within and outside Hana as someone who climbed his way from the bottom of the ladder to the top of the country’s exclusive circle of banking elites.
He entered Seoul Bank -- a predecessor of Hana Bank -- in 1980 as a teller after only graduating high school.
Hoping to receive a college education, Ham enrolled in night courses as an accounting major at the College of Business & Economics at Dankook University in Seoul, and graduated in 1985 with a bachelor’s degree.
Ham became CEO of Hana Bank in 2015, after the bank’s acquisition of Korea Exchange Bank by US private equity Lone Star was finalized in 2015. He later stepped down as CEO of the commercial lender in 2019, after successfully merging the systems of the two separate banks.
From 2016, he took on double duty as vice chairman of the bank’s holding entity Hana Financial Group, mapping out the business strategy of the firm.
By Jung Min-kyung (
mkjung@heraldcorp.com)