According to Sports Kyunghyang, "tax evasion genius" Cha Eun Woo has an extremely sophisticated, tight and systematic tax evasion strategy.
According to confirmation on January 23, Chas Gallery - the company where Cha Eun Woo held the position of internal director, his mother founded - changed its entire organizational form, legal status and company name in September 2024, to The Annie LLC Limited Liability Company.
Previously, Cha Eun Woo's one-person management company (in the form of a joint-stock company) located in Gimpo, but when switching to a limited liability company model, the legal entity address was also moved to Ganghwa Island - which is said to be the eel restaurant directly operated by Cha Eun Woo's parents.
The context of Cha Eun Woo and his mother moving from a joint-stock company to a limited liability company is said to be to avoid external audits.
According to regulations, joint-stock companies when reaching a certain scale are required to undergo independent accounting audits, while limited liability companies are located in the "blind zone" of external audits.
In addition, limited liability companies are not obligated to disclose financial statements, making acts such as tax evasion very difficult to detect from outside.
In particular, the transfer of addresses to Ganghwa is analyzed as a "divine flag" to avoid taxes. Ganghwa district is classified as a growth management area under the Capital Region Planning Law, so when legal entities buy real estate, they can avoid heavy registration and registration tax rates (3 times the basic tax rate).
In fact, this company was also found to have added the "real estate leasing" industry to its business purposes, showing signs of aiming for tax incentives.
The restaurant operated by Cha Eun Woo's parents and his one-person management company (in the form of a limited liability company) actually have the same address, thereby raising suspicions that this is not a real working space, but just borrowing the address - the characteristic of a "ghost company".
Based on these factors, the National Tax Department concluded that Cha Eun Woo had shifted personal income to family legal entities to evade personal income tax of up to 45%, instead applying corporate tax lower by about 20%, and had announced the recovery of about 20 billion won (nearly 360 billion VND) of Cha Eun Woo's tax.
This number is considered the largest in the Korean entertainment industry, and also belongs to the group with the highest tax evasion scale of celebrities in the world.
The case is ranked 6th globally, followed by famous cases including: Pham Bang Bang (about 144 billion won), Trinh Sang (about 56 billion won), Cristiano Ronaldo (about 28 billion won), Willie Nelson (about 22 billion won), Shakira (about 21 billion won).
Meanwhile, Cha Eun Woo (a member of Astro group) enlisted in July last year, serving in the Army band.
He has starred in the Netflix film project "The Wonderfuls" and is expected to air in 2026. But with the current scandal, the work may not be able to air as planned.
