Anchor: The founder and former chair of Daewoo Group, Kim Woo-choong, died on Monday at the age of 82. He leaves a complicated legacy behind, as he is inextricably linked to both South Korea's rapid economic ascension and to the excesses that contributed to the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Our Bae Joo-yon has more. 

Report: Kim Woo-choong, a titan of South Korea's rapid 20th century economic development who founded what was for a time the country's second-largest company has died at the age of 82.

He passed away at a hospital in Suwon, just south of Seoul, at 11:50 p.m. on Monday due to a chronic disease.

Kim founded Daewoo Group in 1967 at the age of 30 and in just ten years transformed the company into one of the nation's four largest conglomerates.

Kim expanded his group through mergers and acquisitions during South Korea’s industrialization period, commonly known as the “Miracle on the Han River,” and is strongly associated with the country's export-led development success.

Kim even wrote a best-selling business book released in 1989 entitled “It's a Big World and There's Lots to be Done.” 

However, Daewoo came crashing down to earth just as quickly as its stratospheric rise. It was discovered that the firm inflated its assets by about 41 trillion won during the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s, and Kim fled the country.

Daewoo was forced to split into smaller, independent companies. Six years later in 2005, Kim returned to South Korea and was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison and ordered to forfeit nearly 18 trillion won for fraud. 

He received a presidential pardon for the prison time but paid less than one percent of the court-ordered forfeiture. He spent most of his life afterwards in Vietnam.

Kim's last public appearance was in 2017, and he had reportedly been receiving hospital treatment since December last year as his health deteriorated. His funeral service will be held at 8 a.m. Thursday at Suwon's Ajou University Hospital.
Bae Joo-yon, KBS World Radio News.