Asian Junkie Asian pop. Without discretion.
Alright, so I’m sorry for the spam about this HYBE/ADOR thing, especially to those who are not interested in corporate warfare/messy drama stuff. However, because this has major potential implications for the K-pop industry and is a developing story, the significant updates are coming out hot and heavy.
One thing about corporate finance news, the money publications are ALL over it. Holy shit, so many updates, lmao. Gambling addict type shit for investors.
— Asian Junkie (@asianjunkiecom) April 23, 2024
The recent news is significant because it allegedly details findings of the audit and provides at least one piece of evidence that it’s all legit.
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Basically, the latest is that the HYBE audit team reportedly discovered two plans that ADOR execs had in mind for the company to get out from under HYBE. Either they would sell the company to sovereign wealth funds, like those of Singapore or Saudi Arabia, or they would form a separate company around NewJeans after cancelling their contracts with HYBE/ADOR.
In order to do the first plan, Min Hee Jin would need to make herself majority shareholder with the help of private equity, getting the ADOR board to vote for a paid capital increase to dilute shares of others. However, this would be contentious and could be blocked by HYBE, and financial analysts saw it as a long shot. The second plan was to claim HYBE mistreated NewJeans and to terminate their contract based on that, and obviously it’d be important to get the members to go along with it. Relevantly, they report that saying ILLIT were plagiarizing them was part of that plan. The only other scenario floated was essentially paying the buyout fee for NewJeans, which would obviously be gigantic.
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Additionally, further reports say HYBE’s audit found two documents from an ADOR exec that effectively spelled out their plans to leave HYBE. A March 23 one contained the aforementioned sovereign wealth fund plan, along with the ADOR execs who would be responsible for appealing to the investors. A March 29 one contained “make us untouchable” and “ultimately escape” under “Goals“. Significantly, the report also provided a photo as evidence that the document exists.
Arguably, the crazier thing is that it’s also being reported that those documents quote Min Hee Jin as telling others that Bang Si Hyuk copied her for BTS as well, and also dragged TWS and RIIZE into this by accusing them of also copying NewJeans. Basically, it says she got mad whenever another group (presumably TWS in particular) was referred to as a male version of NewJeans.
Additionally, HYBE said that contrary to Min Hee Jin’s claims that a response to her internal complaint was never received, they claim to have sent one and she confirmed receipt of it.
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Honestly, the primary thing that gives me pause about concluding these are damning reports is that it all sounds so insane that it’s unbelievable. I don’t mean to underestimate anybody’s ego or paranoia, but it would obviously be deranged for a person to claim all this, so my immediate question is, “Somebody had to have made this shit up about her … right?” Like it’s nuts.
I gotta admit, whether Min Hee Jin wrote "my plans to betray HYBE" in a diary or that HYBE typed some shit up real fast on a Word document to frame her, either one is sitcom-level shit.
— Asian Junkie (@asianjunkiecom) April 23, 2024
Plus, I still can’t wrap my head around them allegedly taking notes on all this, and apparently all on company computers or something? Do it at home, maybe? What is happening?
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Update
Alright, well it turns out that the reports about the documents were somehow legit. However, the excuse the unnamed ADOR exec used when confronted with the findings was that they were his own personal memos and not shared with anybody else in the company, including Min Hee Jin. Essentially, he’s claiming it was just him jotting down rants amid bitter feelings between ADOR and HYBE, that it just all happened to be on his work computer, and because of that is thus now being blown up into being a part of some kind of ADOR conspiracy when it wasn’t.
All of this is unreal.
I hope the Min Hee Jin response is that she found a HYBE document titled "How to plagiarize and sabotage NewJeans" just to complete the absurd circle. And the exec whose name is on it says his dog wrote it.
— Asian Junkie (@asianjunkiecom) April 23, 2024
