Saturday, noon. The secretariat at the Newstar Building.

Seo Jian took a sip of coffee and went back over the document open on her monitor.

Ha Tae-ung had left on his business trip to the States, but the workload hadn't let up. If anything, there were more calls than usual, and the work kept piling up.

With the time difference, people who used to call the chairman directly were going through the secretariat now.

One name was attached to a whole string of overseas private equity funds and investment firms.

H.R!

That one name covered several companies. On paper, every one of them had different shareholders and different managers.

Not a single one listed the chairman, Ha Tae-ung, by name.

And yet whenever the affiliates' chiefs faced an important decision, they came to Chairman Ha Tae-ung without fail.

What did the Chairman think? Could they go ahead for now?

Seo Jian hadn't gone as far as checking each company's governance structure.

But calls came in from outside, and every one of them ended up in the same place. That alone was enough to make a pretty good guess.

The hidden owner was one man. Chairman Ha Tae-ung!

"This one wants the Chairman's opinion first, too……."

Seo Jian flagged the email. Her inbox held revised investment terms, a request to release more funds, even an itemized bill for remodeling work.

The businesses were all different, but every one of them ended on much the same question.

Not that she reviewed and decided everything herself.

She sorted what the chiefs could handle at their own level from what had to go to the Chairman. Anything that needed a contract review went to Jo and Jang.

When an attachment was missing, she asked for it again.

Where an amount had changed, she checked it against the earlier estimate and noted it separately. She wasn't trying to stand in for the lawyers.

The point was to lay things out so the person in charge could see at a glance what to focus on.

Coming in on a weekend to work through it over coffee…