Both the ruling party and opposition party made critical remarks on the current dispute over management control underway within Lotte Group.
Kim Young-woo, senior spokesperson of the New Frontier Party, said in a briefing on August 4, "The family quarrel in Lotte Group is getting uglier. They don't care about how people feel about the whole thing and just engage in muckraking tactics with each other. This is a disgrace to our national prestige and affects the economy in a negative way."
He continued, "The main factor for Lotte Group to become a top-five conglomerate in Korea was not just because of a few people at the top but because of thousands of employees working quietly in their positions and millions of customers who gave trust to the company. Now that Lotte has revealed itself as a highly untransparent company in terms of corporate governance, it must reform itself to regain confidence with the people."
The opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy also was critical about the business group. Party whip Lee Jong-geol said on the same day, "The government has long preached that the current economic malaise and youth unemployment were largely due to employees themselves and that labor reform is the way to go. Once you look at how bad the corporate governance is in Lotte Group, however, you have this depressing feeling that all these talks were empty and self-deceiving. The opaque governance structure of major business groups is what makes the national economy more perilous than anything else. This is exactly what we are talking about the Korean discount."
Lee Seok-hyun, Vice Speaker of the National Assembly, also commented on the current state of affairs in Lotte, "Even though more than 90 percent of Lotte's sales revenue is generated in Korea, the elder son speaks publicly in Japanese only while the younger son betrays his own father like some drama, all of which makes me disgusted."
