The word 'chaebol' is correct and usable in written English.
It refers to large, family-controlled and often diversified South Korean business conglomerates. For example: "The chaebol Samsung is one of the largest and most successful conglomerates in the world."
But unlike in South Korea, where the chaebol act in close concert with politicians, India's firms only engage with the state opportunistically it is their enemy as well as occasional partner.
Samsung, one of the five big chaebol, long had a rule that it would not employ anybody from that region.
Of the top 30 chaebol, 25 have debt-to-equity ratios of more than three-to-one, and ten of more than five-to-one, against the one-to-one usual in an ordinary economy.Eight big chaebol have sought protection from their creditors this year.
Now Mr Kim is no longer persecuted by the state; the chaebol no longer have rules barring the hiring of people from the Cholla area; several Chollaites, indeed, have won good jobs in industry and the government.
He says he will reduce the gap between rich and poor and rein in the country's conglomerates, or chaebol.
India is exporting a corporate form which owes as much to South Korea's chaebol, Japan's keiretsu and Brazil's barons as it does to a current American or European ideal of the firm.Perhaps India is just at an earlier chapter of the Western script.
The obvious danger for chaebol firms is that favouritism, rather than business acumen, could lead one to buy from another.
If this works, SB and AHP could save more than $1 billion a year.In this section Movers and shakers Popping the question Look see, it's Yuksi An oil bounce Better than the real thing Cable's hold on America The chaebol in denial A man for all seasons . . .
When banks were privatised in the 1980s, the government spread ownership thinly in order to prevent the chaebol, the country's big conglomerates, from gaining control over finance as well as industry.
More insidious is a practice know as "mutual-payment guarantees" in which chaebol subsidiaries promise to pay third-party lenders if their sister firms default on loans.
Such devices explain why, when one chaebol subsidiary stumbles, the entire conglomerate can be dragged into bankruptcy, even if the individual firms seem financially independent in their accounts.The chances of ruin are greater still if one subsidiary finances another by "pre-paying" for goods and services six months or more in advance.
