Lotte Corp., the holding company of South Korea’s fifth-largest conglomerate Lotte Group, will hold an extraordinary shareholders meeting next week to seek approval for its merger with six unlisted companies to streamline the group’s complex cross-shareholding structure.

The company said on Tuesday a shareholders meeting will be held on Feb. 27 as initially planned despite a leadership vacuum at the conglomerate after the group’s chairman Shin Dong-bin last week was sentenced to 30 months in prison for bribery charges in an influence-peddling scandal that ousted the country’s former President Park Geun-hye last year.

Merging the six unlisted affiliates - Lotte GRS, Lotte International, Lotte Logistics, Fuji Film Korea, Daehong Communications, and Lotte Data Communication - under Lotte Corp. is aimed at ending Lotte Group’s complex cross-shareholding chains, a regulatory requirement for the conglomerate to completely turn into a holding company system under Lotte Corp. that was launched as the retail giant’s holding company in October.

Since Lotte Group Chairman Shin vowed to resolve the group’s complex cross-shareholding structure in August 2015, the conglomerate has continuously put out efforts to simplify its ownership structure based on multi-layered cross-shareholding among affiliates to improve transparency. Before June 2014, Lotte Group was engaged in total 748,963 circular shareholding loops.

Once the reorganization is completed, Lotte Group will have removed all of its cross-shareholding ties among affiliates, and the number of subsidiaries with intra-group ownership will be reduced to zero.

After winning shareholders’ approval, Lotte will be required to promote the merger by April 1. For the merger to go through, more than one third of shareholders with voting rights must attend the meeting and more than two thirds of them should vote for the plan.

Shares of Lotte Corp. ended 0.95 percent or 600 won ($0.6) lower on Tuesday at 62,400 won, which is lower than the share price of 63,635 won, which allows shareholders who oppose the merger to claim for the purchase of their shares.

Lotte Group expects the merger plan to be easily approved by the shareholders.

An unnamed official from the conglomerate noted that the profit minority shareholders would be able to earn from selling their shares at around the current price isn’t that big given taxes that will be imposed on the margin. Chairman Shin and family members also own up to 54.3 percent of Lotte Corp. shares, suggesting that the merger proposal would be passed without much difficulty.

By Lee Han-na and Lee Eun-joo

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