By Ryu Jin
Staff Reporter
For Lotte Group Chairman Shin Kyuk-ho, July 2007 could prove to be the most taxing month in his life. Having witnessed his long dream of a super-tall skyscraper in Seoul collapse last week, Shin, 85, might have to swallow another bitter pill this week.
While Seoul’s latest decision put a damper on his grand plan to build the world’s largest indoor amusement park, Incheon is set to decide Tuesday on the fate of an 18-hole golf course near Mt. Gyeyang, another long-cherished desire of the elderly business tycoon.
But, apart from controversies over the feasibility of those projects, Shin and his group are now drawing criticism from not only civic groups and environmental activists but ordinary citizens at home.
Shin’s ambitious plan to build a 555-meter, 112-story amusement park began nearly two decades ago, when his Lotte Group -- South Korea’s fifth-largest business conglomerate and top retail giant -- bought a large piece of land in Songpa-gu, southern Seoul.
Lotte Group, which has already been operating the ``Lotte World’’ in Jamsil, also seated in southern part of the capital, presented a plan late 1988 to the Seoul Metropolitan City Government to erect a 33-story ``Lotte World II’’ in the newly purchased site.
In the early 1990s, the group revised the plan to construct a 100-story hotel with a total floor space of 650,000 square meters, which would also comprise of a department store, shopping malls and other commercial facilities.
But the project faced major obstacles for a long period of time until the late 1990s, as the city government repeatedly turned it down for such reasons as the expected traffic congestion as well as environmental problems.
``You see doing business here is this difficult. Who on earth would come with dollars to South Korea?’’ Shin said in 1998, when his group finally got an endorsement for the plan for a 36-story building.
Yet the chairman did not appear to be pleased about the approval: Lotte Group once again changed the plan in 2002 to create a 555-meter skyscraper, the highest in the world at that time. But it faced a fresh barrier: airplanes in the sky.
Last Thursday, the Seoul city government decided after a consultation meeting with the central government not to allow the construction of the super-tall building, citing flight safety concerns at the nearby Seoul Airport.
``We decided to accept the petition by the Ministry of National Defense, which raised concerns over aviation safety,’’ a city government official said. ``We would permit only a building with a height of 203 meters at most.’’
Lotte Group has yet to make its own decision whether it would take legal steps to get the approval again or just scale down the construction plan. ``It would take some more time before we get to the final decision,’’ a group official said on condition of anonymity.
However, public sentiment regarding Lotte’s new amusement park project does not seem so favorable. Lotte World in Jamsil, which boasts an 18-year history, has already drawn criticism for loose safety measures and tragic accidents in the past few past years.
In March last year, a safety supervisor at Lotte World was charged with negligence over the death of an employee, who fell from a roller coaster. Scores of people were injured in a stampede for free admission passes, which Lotte World offered in the form of an apology.
Lotte World reopened on July 1 after 170 days of closure, which followed another accident in June 2006, when a 30 centimeter square tile fell from the ceiling above the tracks of the amusement park’s indoor roller coaster built exclusively for children.
In the meantime, Lotte Group’s other construction project to build a golf course in a greenbelt in Incheon is also shrouded in dark clouds because of strong objections from local residents and environmental activists.
Lotte Engineering & Construction, in particular, has allegedly presented a forged report on the environmental impact assessment for a successful bid for the plan, while pouring oil on the flames.
While civic groups have filed a complaint against the company, the Incheon Metropolitan City government is set to make a final decision whether or not to approve the golf course construction plan on Tuesday.
``Lotte has not fulfilled social responsibility as a chaebol and is only pushing frantically for such large-scale projects as the golf course construction and ultrahigh-rise building,’’ one of the local civic organizations said. ``It should stop the projects immediately.’’