SME CEO Lee Sung Soo accuses Lee Soo Man of delaying aespa’s comeback, megalomania, and wanting to create weed casino music cities

So I took some time off from covering the SM Entertainment internal and external mess to let the dust settle a bit as the next major move seemed to be on Lee Soo Man’s lawsuit against the company. However, Lee Sung Soo went and ruined those plans, as he came out today with a YouTube video on his personal account.

It’s a 28-minute long video, in which he addresses a variety of subjects regarding how everything has even reached this point, but perhaps most notably the possibility of Lee Soo Man engaging in fraud and tax evasion, his power-hungry actions to remain in control of the company, purposefully tanking SME’s sales (including shuttering aespa’s comeback), and a grand vision of music cities with casinos where people can smoke weed.

By the way, if you didn’t know, Lee Sung Soo is Lee Soo Man’s nephew.

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Lee Sung Soo claims Lee Soo Man ordered his allies within the company to basically rally behind him, both publicly and contractually. A way for him to maintain control, basically.

• Make executives on the board campaign Lee Soo Man’s importance to SM Entertainment and outwardly express that they need Lee Soo Man.
• Have SM Entertainment sign a consulting deal with Lee Soo Man to give legitimacy to his actions.
• Have all of SM Entertainment’s artists sign a contract with Lee Soo Man’s separate business entity (CTP) for all of their overseas promotions.
• Or have SM Entertainment sign a second production contract with Lee Soo Man in Korea.
• To find a way for SM Entertainment to have a lower revenue in the first quarter to prove that the company isn’t as profitable without Lee Soo Man.
• To push back albums slated for February and March to be released in April.

Additionally, a shareholder’s response team with a budget of ~$8 million was created to find a way for Lee Soo Man to return to the company, and alleged sudden changes to the executive board were done at the behest of LSM.

The CT Planning part is basically a tax evasion and fraud allegation, which is not new to LSM or SME.

According to the CEO, Lee Soo-man founded a Hong Kong-based production company named CT Planning Limited in 2019 to evade taxes and has been seeking to expand that company’s businesses to include all of SM artists’ overseas music activities.

Lee Sung Soo then mentioned Lee Soo Man’s reported contract with SME that would pay him for the next 70 years.

Even after he stops producing, SM would need to pay Lee Soo Man 6% of revenue sales from artists’ albums for the next 70 years, as well as 3% of management revenue for three years from 2023. That’s approximately ₩80.0 billion KRW (about $62.3 million USD). I was so ashamed to meet SM’s employees, artists, and all of our investors.

For a guy whose “production company” has siphoned off millions from SME through Like Planning, that is … something.

As far as the deal with HYBE is concerned, Lee Sung Soo notes that Lee Soo Man’s role is limited to a few years in Korea, but is unlimited overseas and might be illegal.

(In the contract with HYBE), Lee Soo Man’s role as a producer domestically is limited to three years, but there are no limits to his role as a producer overseas. Why did you make a clause for overseas production at all in a stock acquisition contract? Did HYBE agree, knowing the possibility that Lee Soo Man’s foreign business(CTP) might be illegal? Or did they sign the contract without knowing?

Perhaps most notably given it’s what fandoms will notice most, he mentioned that Lee Soo Man specifically screwed with aespa’s planned comeback, presumably to lower SME’s first quarter revenue but also to insert his performative eco-activism into it.

Originally, the girl group was set to release a new album on February 20, ahead of their first solo concert in Seoul from February 25-26. However, during the album production process, Lee Soo Man ordered Yoo Young Jin and aespa’s A&R team to change the lyrics of the group’s comeback song to include references to “tree planting” and “sustainability”. Despite the fact that these themes did not fit in with aespa’s metaverse storyline, Yoo Young Jin and the A&R team attempted to include lyrics such as “just sustainability” and “decrease by just 1%”. However, CEO Lee Sung Soo ultimately made the decision to cancel aespa’s comeback, as the group’s new song was “ruined”. The aespa members even shed tears after hearing that their new song would be scrapped.

This is just brutal.

He followed that by mentioning LSM allegedly had a fun idea in making a weed casino.

Furthermore, Lee Sung Soo claimed that Lee Soo Man, who has been envisioning the construction of a ‘SMart Music City‘ featuring music festivals, open auditions, creative collaboration, a drone port, and more, was in fact only fueling his own greed and ambitions. Lee Sung Soo accused Lee Soo Man of attempting numerous overseas real estate dealings even when he was denied purchase of land in certain countries, and also alleged that Lee Soo Man planned on installing casinos at his ‘Music Cities’, despite the fact that these ‘Music Cities’ would mostly attract tourists and consumers in the teens and twenties. Furthermore, Lee Sung Soo stated that Lee Soo Man was an advocate of “legalizing marijuana”, which would “allow people to enjoy music and entertainment even more”. 
Lee Sung Soo ended by accusing, “Lee Soo Man wanted to use the company that he created, and the artists who belong to that company, so that he could promote his ‘Lee Soo Man City’, which he hoped to raise all over the world.” 

This is absolutely elite. Now I’m picturing LSM getting high in America at festivals and was like, “This shit is tight.”

Well, I gotta say, I was skeptical at first about how much mess this kind of thing would actually lead to, but so far it’s been almost better than expected with this still at the beginning stages of mess and already things are escalating quickly and getting as ugly as can be.