Samsung Heirs Stage a Korean Soap Opera SEOUL - Lee Kun-hee, the chairman of the largest South Korean business conglomerate, Samsung, and the country's richest man, is not known for being talkative. Partly because of his reticence, what few public remarks he makes are studied by his reverential employees with the same zeal that devout Christians might apply when parsing biblical quotations. These days, however, Mr. Lee, 70 - perhaps the country's most exalted business leader - is displaying a wholly different side, allowing himself to be caught up in a spectacular, all-too-public squabble with his elder brother over the fortune amassed by their father, the late Samsung founder, Lee Byung-chull. Last week, the elder brother, Lee Maeng-hee called his younger brother "childish" and "greedy." On Tuesday, the Samsung chairman said of his brother: "He says with his own mouth that he is the eldest son of our family, but no one in our family, including myself, regards him as such. In fact, I have never seen him showing up for the family ritual for our father's anniversary. That is about the worst thing one can say publicly about a son, particularly the eldest son, of a Korean family in this Confucian society, where the annual rite for deceased ancestors is considered to be the most sacred duty of children. "These guys are better than Korean soap operas," Tom Coyner, a management consultant based in Seoul who is the author of "Doing Business in Korea," said of the gossip the family feud has inspired. The dispute has become a sensation in a country where the financial elite face growing public scrutiny in an election year and, as Mr. Coyner put it, people still hold a "traditional perception that if you are very wealthy, you got there by illegal means." But Chung Sun-sup, head of chaebul.com, a Web site that specializes in monitoring the country's family-controlled conglomerates, generally known and spelled as chaebol, said there was a reason for Mr. Lee to panic, waxing uncharacteristically spiteful against his siblings: They are demanding part of the shares he controls in Samsung Life, the largest South Korean insurance company, which is also the biggest shareholder of Samsung Electronics, the crown jewel of the conglomerate. "Depending on how the court rules or whether the siblings can settle their dispute outside court, this could threaten Mr. Lee's control on the entire group," Mr. Chung said. He must feel like standing at the edge of a cliff. No wonder he reacts so sensitively. The accusations of greed flying back and forth between the families of the two billionaire siblings have kept the local gossip mill turning for weeks. South Koreans cannot seem to get enough of the family behind Samsung, whose mystery-shrouded inner workings many liken to those of another famous Korean clan: the Kim family that rules North Korea. Like the new North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Mr. Lee is the third son of the founder but managed to inherit his father's fortune. Like Mr. Kim's eldest brother, Kim Jong-nam, Lee Maeng-hee remains alienated and unhappy. "I still cannot forget the shock," Lee Maeng-hee said in his 1993 memoir, "Buried Story," recalling a family meeting his father called in 1976, before a cancer operation, where he designated Kun-hee as successor. By then, a distance had developed between father and me but I still believed that the ultimate power over Samsung would come to me. Lee Byung-chull founded Samsung in 1938 and had three sons and five daughters, most of whom are now leading their own business enterprises. He died in 1987 after breaking with the traditional Confucian practice of handing over the reins of business to the eldest son. Under the leadership of Lee Kun-hee, Samsung has grown into the best-known South Korean brand globally, producing ships, apartments, computer chips and cellphones. Mr. Lee's shareholdings in Samsung subsidiaries were estimated at 10 trillion won, or $8.8 billion, last month.