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‘Nut rage’ exec freed from S. Korea jail after five months

The Columbian
Published: May 21, 2015, 5:00pm

SEOUL, South Korea — A court’s decision to suspend her sentence means that Heather Cho, daughter of the chairman of Korean Air Lines Co., can put away her plastic spoon and stop accepting handouts from her fellow convicts.

Cho, convicted of usurping a pilot’s authority after ordering a crew member deplaned, was released Friday by the Seoul High Court, which gave her a 10-month suspended jail term.

Cho had been incarcerated since December in the wake of the so-called nut rage incident, in which she lambasted a crew member for serving macadamia nuts incorrectly before ordering the plane back to the gate at John F. Kennedy Airport so she could expel the chief purser.

The case stirred outrage among South Koreans at the wealthy, who saw it as symbolic of the sense of privilege felt by families that run the country’s chaebols, or conglomerates.

Cho and her father, Cho Yang-ho, together own about 444 billion won in stocks and live in two of the poshest neighborhoods in Seoul, according to corporate watchdog CEOSCORE. The wealth still couldn’t prevent her from being locked up in a 46-year-old jail on the outskirts of Seoul.

A month after Cho’s Dec. 30 arrest on charges including obstructing aviation safety, President Park Geun-hye said the country should neither give business owners special treatment nor discriminate against them.

“Cho’s case prompted chaebol to look back on themselves and how they are viewed by ordinary people,” Lee Ho-chul, a political science professor at Incheon National University, said by phone. “There is still work to be done. The perception that companies are best run by trained business executives rather than ‘royal families’ has yet to spread further.”

In February, Cho was sentenced to a year in prison on charges including changing a plane’s flight path. The Seoul High Court rejected that charge, saying the plane had not yet taken off.

The court added Cho needed “a new chance” after becoming a changed person through reflecting on her actions. On her way home she said little to reporters, stooping behind her lawyers and covering her face with both hands occasionally, according to footage broadcast by YTN.

In letters Cho wrote earlier this year to a lower court, Cho said she regretted not having more compassion for others, describing how her fellow inmates made her realize her shortcomings by sharing everything from shampoo to snacks and making her feel accepted when she was treated like an outcast outside prison.

She was still sentenced to one year in prison. The court said her actions in New York were “extremely dangerous and lacking in common sense” and she treated her employee “like a slave.”

Cho resigned as the No. 2 executive at Korean Air, where she managed catering, the in-flight sales business, cabin services and the hotels division. She was removed from all executive posts at all affiliates.

She apologized in public on Dec. 12 as she appeared for questioning by authorities. Her father later called her “foolish” at a separate news conference, bowing his head.

Her release on Friday refocuses international attention on the practices of the chaebol, which have come under tighter controls since Park took office in February 2013. Her government banned the creation of new cross-shareholdings between affiliates and passed fair-trade laws aimed at limiting profits earned by chaebol family members from transactions between group companies.

Cho, who went to Cornell University, joined South Korea’s largest carrier in 1999, according to a biography posted on the website of Singapore’s Nanyang Business School.

Her father is chairman of the Hanjin Group of companies that includes Korean Air, Hanjin Shipping Co. and Hanjin Transportation Co. He’s also the president of the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics organizing committee.

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