Korea Zinc Company, Ltd. (KRX:010130) has an extraordinary general meeting scheduled for 10:00 on 9 September 2026. On 21 August, two shareholders asked the Seoul Central District Court to stop a large block of shares from voting at it.
The applicants are Young Poong Corporation and Korea Corporate Investment Holdings — the vehicle through which the private equity firm MBK Partners holds its position. The respondents are Korea Zinc itself, thirteen named individuals, and a company called P23 Partners. DART masks personal names in these filings, but eleven of the thirteen individuals are shown with the surname Choi, which is the founding family's name.
The case number is 2026카합21561; the 카합 prefix marks a provisional-injunction case. The stated value of the subject matter is ₩100m, which tells you nothing; the shares at stake are the point.
The relief sought is specific and unusual. The court is asked to order that Korea Zinc must not permit the named parties to vote their shares on the listed agenda items at the 9 September meeting, and separately that those parties must not exercise those votes.
The legal basis given is two provisions that a US investor will not recognize and needs to.
The first is article 150(1) of the Capital Markets Act. Korea's equivalent of a Schedule 13D filing requires anyone crossing 5% to disclose their holding, their purpose, and critically any agreement to act in concert with others. Where that obligation is breached, Korean law does something American law generally does not: it suspends the voting rights attached to the improperly reported shares, and can compel their disposal. A disclosure failure in Korea is not merely a penalty matter. It can decide a vote.
The second is article 542-12(4) of the Commercial Act — the so-called 3% rule. When a listed company elects members of its audit committee, a large shareholder's votes are capped at 3% of outstanding shares regardless of how much stock it actually owns. The rule exists to stop a controlling holder from choosing the people who audit it. In a contested meeting it becomes a weapon, because the side with fewer shares can win an audit committee seat that the side with more shares cannot block.
Read together, the application is an allegation that the Choi-side holders and their affiliates are acting in concert without having said so, and that their votes should therefore be restricted or disqualified.
The filings from the past three weeks read as a campaign rather than a dispute.
On 6 August, Choi Yun-birm filed a substantial shareholding report. On 11 August Korea Zinc convened the extraordinary meeting and filed its proxy solicitation materials. On 12 August Young Poong filed competing proxy solicitation materials for the same meeting. Korea Zinc disclosed court rulings on 7 August and again on 25 August, and disclosed newly filed control-dispute litigation on 14 August, twice on 19 August, on 20 August, on 21 August and on 26 August.
That is at least eight separate control-dispute disclosures in a single month, alongside two sets of proxy materials aimed at the same shareholders.
The other thing that happened in that window deserves noting on its own. On 13 August the company filed corrections to every periodic report it has published since FY2022 — the annual reports for 2022, 2023 and 2024, the 2025 annual report, and each quarterly and half-year report in between. Eleven restatements filed on one day. The filings do not summarize what changed in a way I can read from outside, and anyone with a position should go and look. Restating four years of accounts in the middle of a proxy fight is not a routine housekeeping exercise.
Korea Zinc smelts more zinc and lead than any single site on earth, produces a great deal of the world's silver, and has spent the past few years pushing into nickel and battery materials. Seoul treats it as a strategic supplier of critical minerals. That is why this fight has run for two years and why it attracts government attention.
The commercial argument each side makes is now public. Korea Zinc's own shareholder materials argue that MBK, which under a disclosed cooperation agreement with Young Poong would lead management, has no investment or operating experience in non-ferrous metals, and that a US project the company refers to as Project Crucible depends on the current management's relationship with the American government and would be jeopardized by a change of control.
That is a serious argument and also exactly the argument every incumbent management makes. Whether the relationships are personal to the current leadership or institutional to the company is not something an outside investor can verify.
An easy thing to lose in the litigation is that the underlying company is having its best year ever. First-half 2026 revenue was ₩12,444.6bn, up 62.5%, with operating income of ₩1,333.2bn, up 151.5% — more in six months than the ₩1,231.9bn earned across all of FY2025. Second-quarter revenue of ₩6,372.6bn and operating income of ₩587.1bn were both records.
That cuts against the challengers' usual case. It is much harder to argue for a change of management at a company posting record results than at one that is struggling, and MBK's original thesis was formed when metal prices and treatment charges were considerably less favourable.
It also cuts the other way. A business performing this well makes control of it worth more, which raises the incentive on both sides to spend on lawyers rather than settle.
The injunction may well fail, and the base rate for pre-meeting voting injunctions in Korea is not high. Courts are reluctant to disenfranchise shareholders before a meeting on contested facts, and the standard for showing an undisclosed concert-party agreement is demanding — it requires more than shared interests or a family relationship.
If the court declines, the meeting proceeds on the votes as they stand and the outcome depends on the register and on the institutional shareholders. Korea's National Pension Service and foreign institutions have decided several Korean control contests in recent years and will decide this one if the shares are not restricted.
There is also a chance the whole thing settles. Two years of litigation is expensive, and both sides now hold stakes large enough that a negotiated board composition would be worth more to each than another year of injunctions.
The court's decision on 2026카합21561, which has to come before 9 September for the injunction to have any purpose. That single ruling determines whether the meeting is a vote or a formality.
After that, the meeting result itself, and specifically the audit committee ballot, where the 3% cap applies and where a minority holder can win a seat outright.
Third, and separately from the fight: what the 13 August restatements actually changed. Eleven corrected reports covering four years is the kind of disclosure that matters long after a proxy contest is over, and it has been almost entirely obscured by the litigation running alongside it.
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