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All appeals are dismissed.
The costs of appeal are assessed against the Defendants.
Reasons
The grounds of appeal are examined (to the extent of supplement in case of supplemental appellate briefs not timely filed).
1. Regarding ground of appeal No. 1
A. If an existing company establishes a new company substantially identical in the form and content of the existing company for the purpose of evading its obligations, the establishment of the new company has abused its corporate system in order to achieve illegal objectives, such as evading its obligations. Therefore, the assertion that the above two companies have a separate legal personality against the creditors of the existing company is not permissible in light of the principle of trust and good faith.
Therefore, the creditor of the existing company can claim the performance of the obligation against either of the above two companies, and such a legal principle applies to the case where a company uses another company with the same type and content as the company actually established for the purpose of evading the obligation.
In addition, whether a corporate personality of an existing company has been used with the intent to evade debts of the existing company should be determined by comprehensively taking into account all the circumstances, such as management status or asset status at the time of closure of the existing company, existence and degree of assets useful to another company in the existing company, and whether reasonable price has been paid in cases of assets transferred from the existing company to another company.
(see, e.g., Supreme Court Decision 2010Da94472, May 13, 2011). B.
The judgment below
According to the reasoning, the lower court: (a) lent money to E-agricultural partnership (hereinafter “instant legal entity”) on a total of seven occasions from December 30, 1998 to April 7, 2001, as indicated in Table 1 of the lower judgment; and (b) on November 25, 2013, the principal and interest on outstanding loans were totaled KRW 5,949,732,200; and (c) the main purpose of the instant legal entity and the Defendants is the joint use facilities related to the management and concentration industry of agricultural, livestock, fishery.