[Aju News DB]
SEOUL -- Cho Hyun-ah came back Thursday to head the troubled hotel business of South Korea's Hanjin Group, three years and four months after she resigned as Korean Air's vice president over a "nut rage" incident that sparked public anger and tarnished the group's reputation.
Korean Air said that at a meeting of shareholders, Cho, 43, was appointed as president of KAL Hotel Network, which runs three hotels on the southern resort island of Jeju and one in the western port city of Incheon.
For more than three years, the daughter of Hanjin group patriarch Cho Yang-ho, the owner of South Korea's top airline, has been self-effacing and low key, appearing regularly for community service at an orphanage in Seoul.
In December 2014, she became enraged when a flight attendant served her some nuts in a bag, rather than on a plate, on board a flight that was forced back to the gate while taxiing to the runway. The incident fueled public anger as it followed a slew of incidents involving group owners and their offsprings.
She was given a twelve-month prison sentence on conviction of violating aviation safety laws, but an appeals court overturned the conviction and handed down a suspended jail term, allowing her to walk free in May 2015. In December last year, the Supreme Court upheld the suspended jail term.
Cho was among the children in the running to replace her father, but she fell off the ladder as the 'nut rage' incident hurt Korean Air's reputation, forcing her father to apologize and suggest he should share some of the blame for not bringing her up correctly.
Many South Koreans saw her behavior as emblematic of a generation of spoilt and arrogant offspring of chaebol owners. Cho, a graduate of Cornell University's hotel management department, had been involved in the group's hotel business such as the Wilshire Grand Center in Los Angeles.
KAL Hotel Network suffered a business setback due to a diplomatic row over an American missile shield that led to China's retaliatory measures including a travel ban. Due to a sharp fall in the number of Chinese tourists, the company's operating loss rose from 2.7 billion won (2.5 million US dollars) in 2016 to 25.3 billion won last year.
reporter
Lim Chang-won
cwlim34@ajunews.com
