Lawmaker anger at Coupang over English at the National Assembly

Coupang’s top executives came under fire last week when they appeared before a National Assembly committee to answer questions about a recent data leak. The criticism, however, was not so much about the leak itself as about the fact that the company’s leaders do not speak Korean. Just to recap, in case you’ve been on vacation, a former Coupang employee has allegedly hoovered up the phone numbers and delivery histories of 33.7 million Coupang customers. God knows what they were doing with it. This is bad. At least I think it might be. But finding out was down in third place on the list of things lawmakers were concerned about. The second was why Coupang’s new CEO Harold Rogers and Brett Matthes, its chief information security officer, were there instead of founding chairman Kim Bom-suk. “Chairman Kim Bom-suk’s absence is a blatant disregard for the Korean National Assembly,” Reform Party leader Lee Jun-seok said after the hearing. He was right. It was a bit of an up-yours, assemblypersons. But to be fair, we are all guilty of a measure of disregard for the National Assembly.