By Park Jae-hyuk
Lotte Group will decide on the provision about its golf resort as early as today for the site of a U.S. anti-missile Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) battery here, according to officials Sunday.
Lotte International, a Lotte unit owning the golf club in the southeastern county of Seongju, is expected to hold a board of directors meeting today to endorse the deal to swap the resort for a piece of military-owned land in Namyangju, Gyeonggi Province.
“Our official stance on the THAAD deal is that we will cooperate with the government for national security,” a Lotte Group spokesman said.
On Feb. 3, the board of directors failed to reach a conclusion on the land provision. The company said an appraisal of the military-owned land and legal reviews on the land exchange procedures would take some time.
The Ministry of National Defense plans to seal the land swap deal right after Lotte decides to offer the Lotte Skyhill Country Club in Seongju County, North Gyeongsang Province.
“As I said before, Lotte already took a certain position,” defense ministry spokesman Moon Sang-gyun said in a press briefing on Friday.
The ministry is expected to sign the contract with Lotte by the end of the month. It has been confident of deploying the U.S. missile defense unit here this September at the latest, after assessing the environmental impact of the deployment for a couple of months.
A headache for Lotte Group is Beijing’s possible economic retaliation against its operations in China which has strongly opposed the deployment of the THAAD system, saying it can monitor airborne objects not only in North Korea but also in China.
Lotte has already experienced various difficulties in China, which watchers point out are outright retaliation to the planned THAAD deployment. China officially denies the accusations, though. China’s state-run media sources have also leveled criticisms over Korea’s fifth-largest conglomerate of late.
“Lotte will hurt the Chinese people and the consequences could be severe,” Xinhua News Agency said in an English-language commentary on Feb. 19. “The Chinese people will not support a company complicit in damaging China's interests.”
On Feb. 21, Global Times, another state-run media outlet in China, published an editorial titled “Lotte should move out of China over THAAD land deal.”
Last December, the Chinese government ordered Lotte to halt a 3 trillion won ($2.6 billion) project to build a theme park near its department store and cinema in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, taking issue with the construction site’s preparedness for fire emergencies.
Chinese authorities also carried out unusual tax audits and fire safety inspections last November.
Lotte Group operates a total of 120 business sites in China, employing 26,000 Chinese workers.