"THINGS are going from bad to worse for the Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who once planned to become America’s Messiah. His following there has dwindled to almost nothing. He is in South America, struggling to revive his career. Now his South Korean business empire has gone bust, a victim of the economic crisis.
On November 30th four companies of Mr Moon’s Tong Il (Unification) Group—Tong Il Heavy Industries, Hankook Titanium, Il Sung Construction and Il Shin Stone—filed for court receivership in Seoul. A fifth member, Il Hwa, a soft-drinks maker, went under in May. The five companies account for three-quarters of the Tong Il group’s business. Their collapse in effect means the end of a firm that was once one of South Korea’s top 30 chaebol, the family-owned conglomerates that dominate the country’s economy.
Tong Il’s immediate problems were the usual ones of corporate South Korea—disappearing profits and huge, unpayable debts—overlaid with an extra one, Unification Church mismanagement. Between them the Tong Il group’s 17 companies had debts of 2 trillion won ($1.2 billion), or 19 times equity, at the end of last year.
Most of the Unification Church’s biggest businesses have been losing money for decades (Mr Moon himself said last year that the Washington Times, a church-backed newspaper in America’s capital, had cost him $1 billion over the previous 15 years), but devotion has kept the operation afloat. The Tong Il group was sustained by money from Japanese church members, who also sold ginseng, stone pagodas and other religious objects, most of them made by Il Shin Stone. But the Japanese donations have dried up as bad publicity and lawsuits have thinned the ranks and revenues of the faithful there."