Powerful clans skirt restraints in South Korea

Seoul

FORGET Machiavelli, or "Game of Thrones." When it comes to staying in power, South Korea's richest business clans have the game plan down.

There is the charity manoeuvre, in which family members park their stakes in their business empires in philanthropic nonprofits, letting them keep control without paying heavy taxes.

There is the new company manoeuvre, in which they create new firms that strike lucrative and friendly business deals with the others they control.

And then there is old-fashioned corporate engineering, in which they merge arms of their empires together to consolidate power, even as other shareholders complain.

With South Korea's biggest business empire, Samsung, caught up in a nationwide political scandal, a new generation of South Korean leaders has vowed to rip up that playbook. Major candidates in Tuesday's election for president have said they will clamp down on South Korea's family-controlled business empires, called chaebol, which dominat…