ⓒKBS News

Shareholders of South Korea's flagship airline Korean Air have removed the company chief and founding family member Cho Yang-ho from its board of directors Wednesday.

Cho fell two-and-a-half percentage points short of the two-thirds majority threshold necessary to keep his seat. Just sixty-four percent of Korean Air's shareholders in attendance voted to reappointment him as director of the board during their annual meeting on Wednesday.

Cho's reappointment was not put to an actual vote as a prior count of proxies had already determined that a third of shareholders would reject the motion.

The 70-year-old lost control of South Korea's flagship carrier 20 years after taking the helm from his late father and Hanjin Group founder Cho Choong-hoon in 1999. He remains the airline’s CEO.

It's the first time that shareholders have taken away management rights from the head of a major conglomerate after the National Pension Service(NPS), the country's biggest institutional investor, adopted what is known as a stewardship code last July.

One day after Cho was ousted, Kumho-Asiana Group announced that its Chairman, Park Sam-koo, who also serves as CEO of Asiana Airlines, would fully resign from all managerial positions following recent controversy over the airline's audit report.

In a statement on Thursday, the airline conglomerate said the 74-year-old chief made the decision to step down in order to take responsibility for causing financial market turbulence.