Samsung Group finds itself in an unprecedentedly confounding situation where the top title of the family-run dynasty would stay empty for a lengthy period after the Seoul Central District Court on Friday sentenced its heir and Samsung Electronics Co. Vice Chairman Jay Y. Lee five years in prison for bribery and other charges.

Lee had been spearheading the country’s biggest conglomerate with 350 trillion won ($310.1 billion) in assets as its father and chairman Lee Kun-hee has fallen into a coma in 2014 after a heart attack.

The prison term for the billionaire heir to Samsung Group has left more than 100,000 corporate employees in global offices in shock. The conglomerate’s four other former key executives including Choi Gee-sung, former vice chairman and head of future strategy office, Samsung’s control tower that was disbanded in the end of February, were also given jail sentences.

In other cases of business tycoons under prosecutorial investigation, right-hand executives avoided sentence when their chiefs went to prison, allowing the group to manage business in general until their owners were released.

The command tower has become entirely empty with the ruling on Lee and others.

Since February, Samsung Group has been led by Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Kwon Oh-hyun. Although business has been in control under Kwon, an unnamed official from Samsung Group said that it would be difficult for him to make bold decisions such as big-scale investments or merger and acquisitions.

Another official from Samsung Group who asked to be unnamed said that the conglomerate believed the management would be in interim mode for a temporary period until Lee becomes acquitted or probated.

With the court’s latest ruling, however, the conglomerate should take the emergency management mode to a next level where all Samsung executives strengthen responsible management and promote strategies for survival, the official said.

The company also fears that if Lee is convicted by the Supreme Court, he may fall under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in the United States, which could make Samsung Electronics face colossal losses from contract cancellations and penalty payment among others.

By Song Sung-hoon and Kim Dong-eun

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