The founder and immediate family members of Korean retail giant Lotte Group own just 2.4 percent of a stake in the businesses they run, the country's antitrust watchdog said Monday.

Lotte was ordered to submit details about its ownership structure to regulators after the two sons of group founder Shin Kyuk-ho engaged in a bitter feud to wrest control of the business group from their aging father last year.

The bickering drew public flak and resulted in the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) demanding ownership-related information.

The information submitted in late August has been examined in detail and gives a good picture of how the country's largest retail giant is owned.

Lotte, the fifth-largest family-run conglomerate in Korea, has operations in food, confectionery, drinks, hotels, and amusement parks. It even owns companies in the construction, chemical and aluminum sectors.

The group initially began as a small confectionery business in Japan before it built up operations in Korea. At present, the bulk of the group's business comes from Korea, with Shin and key family members all holding Korean citizenship.

The FTC said that even compared to other Korean conglomerates the percentage of stock owned by the founder and family members is remarkably small.

"This is possible because Lotte involved its Japan-based affiliates in a complicated cross-shareholding arrangement," it said.

The regulator said that at the apex of this system is Kojunsha, a Japanese packaging company set up in 1967, that controls Lotte Holdings Japan. This Tokyo-based holding company then controls all other Lotte affiliates in both Korea and Japan.

"Of the 86 Lotte affiliates in the country, foreign ownership of stakes stood at 22.7 percent," the FTC said. "In the case of Hotel Lotte, a key company in the ownership structure, overseas stake holding stood at 99.3 percent."

Besides this tie-up between affiliates in the two countries, Lotte had some 67 cross-shareholding arrangements among local companies, which helped the Shin family dominate so many companies.

Under the 2014 law change, Seoul banned new cross-shareholding arrangements, but permits existing ones.

Of the 94 cross-shareholding tieups that exist between Korean conglomerates, Lotte accounts for 71.3 percent.

In addition, the FTC said Lotte is unique because so many of its top companies are not listed on the stock exchange. Of its 36 Japanese affiliates, none are traded on the stock market, while among 86 local companies only eight are listed.

Related to these latest findings, the FTC said it is trying to determine if Lotte engaged in false and incomplete regulatory filings in the past.

"The group seems to have left out crucial information and made false regulatory filings that conflict with domestic disclosure laws," it said. "Investigations can be carried out by checking differences in the report Lotte submitted in the past and cross-checking this with what it provided authorities last year."

The FTC also said it will push for changes to the country's corporate reporting system to include information about foreign-based firms that exert control over local companies. (Yonhap)