How powerful is South Korea’s Lotte Group?

In the past six months, Lotte Group has not been having an easy time. First, it was involved in the incident of Park Geun-hye's "cronyes interfering in politics" last year, which led to scandals such as the president's corruption investigation and the suicide of the vice president. Later, its golf course was favored by the South Korean Ministry of National Defense, and with the government's carrot and stick, it finally agreed to sell it to the company. "Sade" provides land. Today, Lotte has come to a more difficult moment than when it encountered a nationwide boycott in South Korea due to the "nationality scandal" two years ago. However, Lotte, which has opened its arms to THAAD, may have no way of turning back.

"Nod" to THAAD

According to news released by the South Korean Ministry of National Defense on Monday afternoon, the South Korean Ministry of National Defense received a notification from Lotte Group, saying that the Lotte Group Board of Directors this week At the meeting, it was decided to agree to transfer its Seongju Golf Course, which means that Lotte Group agreed to provide South Korea and the United States with the final deployment site of the THAAD anti-missile system.

South Korea’s Ministry of National Defense also said that it is expected to sign a relevant land exchange agreement with Lotte Group on Tuesday, that is, after exchanging 960,000 square meters of land at the Seongju Golf Course, it will exchange land worth the same as the golf course land. State-owned land is provided to Rakuten. To this end, land valuation work for Seongju Golf Course and Namyangju Military Land was completed in January. According to previous predictions, the land price of Seongju Stadium reached 100 billion won.

As South Korea’s neighbors, China and Russia firmly oppose this deployment plan. At a regular press conference on the 27th, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Geng Shuang responded to the matter and said that China expressed firm opposition and strong dissatisfaction to this. Geng Shuang said that the United States and South Korea are advancing the deployment of the THAAD anti-missile system in South Korea, which has seriously undermined the regional strategic balance, severely damaged the strategic security interests of relevant countries in the region, including China, and is not conducive to maintaining peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula.