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Figures converted from Korean won at historical FX rates — see data/company.json.fx_rates. Ratios, margins, and multiples are unitless and unchanged.

Control and incentives, in one frame

Korea Asset In Trust has one class of shares, one voting bloc, and no equity compensation of any kind. The MDM group and its principals hold 54.24% of the votes and 54.24% of the economics — control and ownership are the same number here, which is unusual and simplifies the map [1]. What the map does not simplify is where the money reaches the top: management is paid in cash salary and cash bonus, while the controlling family is paid in dividends on a stake worth roughly $110m at the 7 August 2026 close.

Three dated facts frame everything below. The board shrank from six directors to four at the March 2026 AGM, and the sole inside director now chairs it and runs the company [2]. Kim Kyu-chul, representative director since 2012, left at term expiry on 28 March 2026 after the longest CEO tenure in the sector [3]. And on 12 February 2026 the Financial Services Commission issued the company an institutional warning with a $124,000 administrative fine, alongside a dismissal-equivalent sanction on a former executive vice president who had already been convicted of taking bribes [4].

Who holds the votes

Sources: Q1 FY2026 quarterly report, largest shareholder and related persons, base date 31 March 2026 [1]; FY2025 annual report, share distribution, base date 31 December 2025 [5]; FY2025 annual report, total shares outstanding [6].

Sources: Q1 FY2026 quarterly report, largest shareholder and related persons, base date 31 March 2026, and MDM ownership (Moon Ju-hyun 95%, Min Hye-jung 5%) [1]; values derived at the $1.65 close of 7 August 2026 from company price data.

Moon Ju-hyun's look-through economics run to roughly 42.6% — 15.31% held directly plus 95% of MDM's 28.76% — before any account of MDM Plus, whose own shareholder register is not disclosed in Korea Asset In Trust's filings [1]. He has never held a seat on this board or any of its committees; the 2016 listing prospectus already described him as chairman of the group standing behind MDM [7]. MDM itself is a substantial operating company in its own right: $1.13bn of assets, $0.87bn of equity and $25.0m of FY2025 net income on a consolidated basis [1]. Korea Asset In Trust is the only listed member of the 24-company MDM group [8].

Five years in which the bloc bought nothing and sold nothing

Sources: annual reports FY2021 [9], FY2022 [10], FY2023 [11], FY2024 [12] and FY2025 [13]; Q1 FY2026 quarterly report [1].

MDM has held exactly 35,200,618 shares and MDM Plus exactly 12,397,775 shares in every year from 2021 through the first quarter of 2026 [9] [1]. Moon Ju-hyun's personal line moved once in five years, by 260 shares, in 2022 [10].

The step from 53.62% to 54.34% in 2025 was therefore not a purchase. On 26 March 2025 the company cancelled 1,603,826 treasury shares carried at $8.67m, cutting shares outstanding from 123,977,752 to 122,373,926 — the filing states the year-end percentages moved because of that cancellation [13] [14]. The 0.10pp step back down in the first quarter of 2026 is the removal of Kim Kyu-chul's 120,580 shares from the related-persons table on his term expiry, not a market sale by the family [1].

No shares held by any member of the control bloc are disclosed as pledged or otherwise encumbered in any of the five annual reports. The only share-related collateral in the filings is a $35,000 deposit lodged with Korea Securities Finance against the employee stock ownership association's acquisition loan [15].

What a minority holder can and cannot do

Sources: FY2025 annual report, voting systems and voting rights, base date 31 December 2025 [16]; FY2025 annual report, AGM minutes summary for the 22nd through 24th meetings [17].

Cumulative voting is excluded, so a minority holder cannot concentrate votes to seat a director. With 54.24% in one aligned bloc, ordinary resolutions and director elections are decided before the meeting opens; the special-resolution threshold of two-thirds is the only vote the bloc cannot carry alone. The audit-committee director election is the one structural check Korean law supplies — the 3% rule caps each large shareholder's votes in that election — and the company's own board rules add that removing an audit committee member requires a two-thirds board vote [18]. Across the 22nd, 23rd and 24th AGMs the filings record no shareholder proposal and no dissent [17].

The board, and how it got smaller

Sources: board composition tables in the FY2021 [19], FY2022 [20], FY2023 [21], FY2024 [22] and FY2025 [23] annual reports, and the Q1 FY2026 quarterly report [2].

The board peaked at seven directors in 2023 and stands at four. At the 25th AGM on 26 March 2026, Choi Jin-young and Han Sung-hee were re-elected while Kim Kyu-chul and Lee Gun-ki reached term expiry on 28 March 2026 and were not replaced, taking the count from six to four and disclosed independence from 66.7% to 75% [24] [2]. Over the same window the outside bench turned over completely: Kim Chung-sik, Min Sang-ki and Song Kyung-chul all left in March 2024, Park Jae-young in March 2025, Lee Gun-ki in March 2026 [21] [25]. Of the three outside directors now serving, the longest has been on the board three years.

Sources: Q1 FY2026 quarterly report, board composition and executive roster, base date 31 March 2026 [2] [26]; FY2025 annual report, audit committee membership and expert designation [18].

The audit committee is three outside directors, chaired by the only member designated an accounting or finance expert. Chair and CEO are the same person, and the annual report gives the reason plainly: expertise and efficiency in running the board [23]. Kwon Jun-hak carries the lead independent director designation [2].

Two facts sit alongside the disclosed independence designations rather than contradicting them. Choi Jin-young served as a non-standing adviser to Garip Accounting Corporation, a firm the company retains for advisory work; the filing states his committee duties are unrelated to that engagement [27]. And Song Kyung-chul, an outside director and audit committee chair until his mid-term resignation on 22 March 2024, appeared in the largest shareholder's related-persons table holding 6,413 shares throughout his tenure [12] [28].

Attendance, 2025

Sources: FY2025 annual report, board resolutions and attendance across ten meetings [25]; FY2025 annual report, audit committee activity across eight meetings [27].

The board met ten times in 2025 and the audit committee eight; the filings record every resolution as carried, with no dissenting vote by any director in either body [25] [27]. Outside directors received quarterly management briefings [29] and one external audit-committee training session, delivered in June 2025 [74].

Three board committees the company does not run

Source: FY2025 annual report, board committee composition and reasons for non-operation [30].

The exemption is size-based and the company states the threshold it is waiting on: it will establish the three committees once assets exceed $1.42bn or total trust assets exceed $14.2bn [30]. The practical consequence is that the same four-person board nominates its own members and sets its own pay within the ceiling shareholders approve, and that risk oversight sits in a management committee rather than a board one. The board's own regulations do reserve interested-party transactions, bad-debt write-offs above $0.7m, and any acquisition or disposal above $0.7m to full board approval [31] [32]. Compliance and risk management are combined in one officer, Min Chul-hyun, who serves as both chief compliance officer and head of the risk management division [33].

Operators

Sources: Q1 FY2026 quarterly report, executive roster at 31 March 2026 [26]; FY2025 annual report, executive roster at 31 December 2025 [34]; FY2023 annual report, officer appointments effective 1 January 2024 [35].

The succession was internal and long-signposted. Shin Chan-hyuk joined in December 2015, rose through executive vice president to president, was elected an inside director at the March 2025 AGM, and took the representative-director role and the chair a year later [34] [26]. The one-year overlap as co-inside-director is the clearest handover the filings record.

Beneath him the bench thinned. Nine unregistered executives were in post at end-2024 and six at end-2025, with two retiring in August 2025 [36] [37]. Aggregate unregistered-officer pay went $2.64m across eight officers in 2023, $2.01m across nine in 2024, then $1.48m across six in 2025 [38] [36] [37]. Headcount followed: 203 employees at end-2022, 149 at end-2025 [39] [24].

Cho Hyun-bin is the only officer with a disclosed family connection to the controller — the filings record the relationship as 인척, a relative by marriage. He joined the officer ranks on 1 January 2024 as head of the management strategy office after six years as a general manager, and by end-2025 was running the corporate support division, which covers finance, planning and disclosure [35] [34]. He is 41 and holds no shares.

What the pay actually pays for

Sources: FY2025 annual report, individual pay calculation basis [40]; FY2023 annual report, top-five pay including monthly sales incentives [41]; FY2021 and FY2022 annual reports confirming no stock options granted or exercised [42] [43]; FY2025 annual report, share-based payment transactions with major shareholders [44].

There is no equity in the package, so the usual apparatus of strike prices, vesting schedules and hurdle tests does not exist here. Nothing vests, nothing is deferred, and nothing can be clawed back. The whole variable component is one cash bonus, sized by a payout rate set against the previous year's results.

Sources: individual compensation disclosures in the FY2021 [45], FY2022 [46], FY2023 [47], FY2024 [48] and FY2025 [40] annual reports.

Salary is a ratchet that stopped: $0.59m, then $0.63m, $0.62m, $0.56m and $0.57m — the won salary was unchanged across the last two years and the dollar movement is exchange-rate translation [45] [40]. The bonus is where the operating cycle shows. It fell from $0.51m in FY2023 to $0.14m in FY2025, a 69% cut, over the same span in which operating margin went from 63.0% to 22.9% in the years those bonuses were measured against. The one break in the pattern is FY2023, when the bonus rose 35% on a prior-year margin that had fallen 6.6 percentage points [46] [47]. Because the payout is struck on the preceding year, the FY2025 bonus of $0.14m is the board's read on FY2024, not on FY2025.

Sources: board and employee compensation tables in the FY2021 [49], FY2022 [39], FY2023 [35], FY2024 [50] [51] and FY2025 [24] [52] annual reports; ratio derived from those two series.

The CEO-to-average-employee ratio has stayed in a band of 9.9x to 11.9x for five years — narrow by the standards of listed financials, and it narrowed further in FY2025 because the CEO's bonus fell faster than staff pay. Shareholders raised the director pay ceiling from $1.68m to $2.31m between 2021 and 2023 and have held it unchanged in won since; actual payments have run at 59% to 73% of the ceiling [52]. Outside directors averaged $37,000 in 2025, the lowest of the five years [52].

One design feature runs deeper into the business than the CEO line shows. Divisional heads are paid a monthly incentive struck on cash received when a mandate is won: in FY2023 that component was $121,000 and $149,000 for two executive vice presidents, on base salaries of $177,000 and $185,000 [41]. It pays on origination, while the completion-guarantee obligations those mandates carry sit on the company's balance sheet for years afterwards — a timing mismatch the disclosures state but do not address. How that guarantee exposure works is set out in Business.

How the controlling family is actually paid

Source: FY2025 annual report, dividend history for the 23rd through 25th fiscal years [53]; bloc share derived by applying the year-end control-bloc percentage to the declared total.

The FY2025 dividend of $0.104 a share totals $12.66m, a 37.2% consolidated payout and the eleventh consecutive year-end dividend since listing [53] [54]. Roughly $6.87m of it goes to the control bloc, of which Moon Ju-hyun's direct 15.31% holding alone collects about $1.94m — some 2.7 times the departing CEO's entire $0.72m FY2025 pay package [13] [40]. The controller's incentive here is the dividend and the buyback, not the pay table. The company also names the 2025 treasury cancellation as part of the same shareholder-return policy [54]. What that mix has meant for capital allocation over time belongs to History.

The related-party ledger

Sources: related-party transaction notes in the FY2021 [55] [56], FY2022 [57] [58], FY2023 [59] [60], FY2024 [61] [62] and FY2025 [63] [64] annual reports; percentages derived against reported operating revenue.

Related-party revenue has been a stable 4% to 6% of operating revenue for five years, and the 2016 listing prospectus put the same ratio at 5.85% for the first quarter of 2016 — the dependence is old and it has not grown [7] [63]. MDM Plus is the single largest counterparty every year, contributing $4.76m in FY2025 across trust contracts, interest income and advisory fees [63].

The balance-sheet side is the part that changed. Related-party receivables went from $4.40m at end-2022 to $64.51m at end-2023, and the whole step is a new loan to MDM Plus of $54.61m [58] [60]. That loan was drawn down to $34.68m by end-2024, then increased again by a fresh $4.14m advance in 2025 to $39.27m, carrying a $0.13m allowance [62] [64] [15]. A $6.90m loan to affiliate The M Retail was repaid in full during 2025, and $0.21m of loans to affiliate-company officers went to zero [15].

Two counterweights belong in the same paragraph. The flow runs both ways: MDM, MDM Plus and affiliate One Twenty Five PFV have given the company payment guarantees of $10.54m, $55.67m and $75.60m respectively against down-payment and interim-payment loans it extended to purchasers [66]. And the statutory disclosures on transactions with major shareholders report nothing at all: no credit extension, no asset transfer, no business transaction reaching 5% of revenue, and no share-based award, in the period from the start of the fiscal year to the filing date [44]. The MDM Plus loan sits below that threshold and is disclosed in the notes rather than in that section. Two board resolutions in 2025 — on 9 May and 19 December — were captioned "transactions between interested parties and the company" and carried unanimously [25].

Sources: FY2023 [67], FY2024 [68] and FY2025 [66] related-party notes.

Total key management compensation peaked at $5.41m in FY2023 and fell 24% the following year, tracking the reduction in the officer bench rather than a change in individual terms [67] [68]. Separately, $1.81m of housing and similar loans to officers and employees was outstanding at end-2025 [66].

Insider activity

Sources: largest-shareholder tables in the FY2022 [10], FY2024 [12] and FY2025 [13] annual reports and the Q1 FY2026 quarterly report [1]; treasury cancellation from the FY2025 annual report [14]; Kim Kyu-chul's disposal on retirement from Korean press coverage of the March 2026 filing [69].

Insider dealing here is close to non-existent. Across five annual reports the filings record no open-market purchase and no open-market sale by any controlling shareholder or director; every movement in the tables is an appointment, a retirement, or the treasury cancellation. The company also reports no short-swing profit events requiring disgorgement [70]. Employee stock ownership association holdings have drifted down from 0.43% in 2021 to 0.23% in 2025 [71] [5]. One other shareholder change is worth recording: Korea Asset Management Corporation, the state agency that founded the company in 2001, still held 5.72% at end-2023 and no longer appears in the 5%-holder table from end-2024 [65] [72].

Officer and regulator docket

Sources: FY2025 annual report, financial supervisory and other agency sanctions [4]; Q1 FY2026 quarterly report, sanctions status at 31 March 2026 [73].

The filings identify sanctioned individuals by office and length of service, not by name. Two points can be stated without inference. The representative-director office was held without interruption by Kim Kyu-chul from 2012 until 28 March 2026, so both the January 2024 caution and the May 2024 cautionary warning attach to the office he then occupied [3] [4]. And five separate regulatory actions in thirty-two months, three of them naming individual officers, is a dense record for a company of 149 employees.

Source: FY2025 annual report, sanctions footnote to the 12 February 2026 action [4].

The company's stated remedial steps are internal control reinforcement and training in each case, with fines paid and the January and May 2024 personal actions marked completed [4]. The two individual actions from February 2026 were still marked pending at the Q1 2026 filing date [73]. The compliance function that monitors officer and employee securities trading — the subject of the March 2025 reprimand — reports quarterly checks and rates every period "appropriate" [33].

Separate from the officer docket, the company carries a large but routine litigation load arising from its position as registered owner of trust property: 346 suits against it with a claimed value of $383.7m and 80 suits it has brought worth $100.2m at the end of the first quarter of 2026, none of which management considers capable of materially affecting the business [73]. The 2016 prospectus described the same structural feature, with a roughly 90% win rate on concluded cases and losses generally borne by trust assets rather than the company's own [7].