It's dark days for Samsung, one of Asia's pre-eminent family empires, with reports of the Korean Government moving to investigate whether the nation's largest conglomerate created a slush fund and whether it lobbied key public officials. There is also the allegation that chairman Lee Kun Hee masterminded a bribery network and paid out millions to facilitate the illegal transfer of a controlling stake in the family business to his son. The claim is that from 1997 to 2004, Samsung bribed senior politicians, journalists, bureaucrats and court officials to win special deals for the business.

The question is whether any changes to Samsung's ownership structure, including possibly breaking it up, would affect Korea Inc. As B. J. Lee and George Wehrfritz write in Newsweek, last year Samsung's sales topped $160 billion, or some 15 percent of South Korean GDP, and the group generates a fifth of the country's exports. South Korea is Samsung Land.

With the Korean economy so heavily dependent on a handful of conglomerates, and their influence so pervasive in the daily life of South Koreans, the International Herald Tribune reports that there is a real concern that striking them down might well hurt ordinary people.