Most large Korean companies are family-owned or family-controlled, and most are corrupt. An unusually high percentage of the heads of these companies have criminal records for financial crimes, compared to other developed economies. For decades, presidents have frequently pardoned them -- and many other CEOs would be convicted of financial crimes if the government bothered to charge them.

Presidents of South Korea have often justified their pardons of criminal CEOs by stressing the consequences for the economy. Fortunately, those excuses are less widely accepted than they used to be. Besides, it's not healthy for an economy to be heavily dependent on a small number of family-controlled firms, whether they are corrupt or not. It's true that enforcing the law against those companies may cause a short-term economic downturn, but in the long term, the economy will have a more sustainable foundation.

Incidentally, the Korean term for these large conglomerates, chaebol, is cognate with the Japanese term zaibatsu, which dominated the pre-WWII Japanese economy and shared many characteristics, including family control and political and financial corruption. Japan was better off when they were broken up. Despite appearances, the current Japanese conglomerates are better than the zaibatsu in important ways: they are rarely family-controlled, and they are less corrupt, more accountable to shareholders, and have much better corporate governance as a result.

Some reform of the economy, and less tolerance for corruption among the voters, are likely to be the best things that comes out of the impeachment of the current president.