Chaebol owners’ control of management has been strengthened with an increase in conglomerate shareholdings, a government report said.

The Fair Trade Commission said Sunday that the nation’s top conglomerates were still slow to reform ownership and had adopted intra-group shareholdings more actively this year.

The FTC, which surveyed the nation’s 63 large companies, found that 43 conglomerate owners, especially, have expanded control through the so-called “circular shareholding” structure.

Circular shareholding is a practice that allows a handful of people, usually family members of chaebol conglomerates, to control the entire group of affiliates with small stakes.

According to the antitrust watchdog, the average proportion of intra-group shareholdings among the 43 owner companies was 56.11 percent this year, up 1.9 percent from last year’s 54.20 percent.

While the stakes owned by each chairperson and their relatives decreased to 4.17 percent, those of affiliated companies saw a 2.19 percent increase to 49.55 percent this year, the FTC said.

Samsung, the nation’s largest conglomerate, saw the highest increase in this percentage ― 16.6 percent ― followed by Booyoung with 10 percent, Woongjin with 7.4 percent and Shinsegae with 6.24 percent.

Such distorted ownership structures became more apparent in the nation’s top 10 companies, the FTC said. Their intra-group shareholding ratio had hovered in the 40 percent ratio until recently.

The figure, however, exceeded 50 percent first last year and soared to 55.7 percent this year. During the same period, stakes owned by chaebol family members dropped from more than 1 percent to 0.9 percent.

Among all 63 conglomerates surveyed, the intra-group shareholding ratio was 31.4 percent, up 2.8 percent from 28.6 percent last year.

By Lee Ji-yoon (jylee@heraldcorp.com)