Police to refer Bang Si-hyuk, chairman of K-pop label HYBE, to prosecutors

South Korean police say they will hand the case against Bang Si-hyuk, chairman of HYBE, to prosecutors this week without seeking his detention, a step that would close an investigation running since December 2024.

Hong Seok-ki, who heads the National Office of Investigation at the Korean National Police Agency, said at a briefing on August 31 that officers plan "to forward the case to the prosecution within the week," according to Yonhap. Asked about custody, he said a decision would come at that point.

The allegation concerns the company's 2020 stock market listing. Bang is accused of telling existing investors in 2019 that HYBE, then Big Hit Entertainment, had no plans to go public, while the company was already moving through initial public offering procedures. Those investors sold their stakes to a special purpose vehicle set up by a private equity fund.

Investigators concluded that Bang agreed to take about 30% of the gains from that sale under an earn-out contract that was not entered in HYBE's securities registration statement, and that he helped set up and run the fund. Seoul Economic Daily put his alleged improper gain at around KRW 190 billion, roughly USD $137 million, with the figure across him and alleged accomplices calculated at KRW 262.6 billion.

The case has moved slowly and publicly. Police searched the Korea Exchange and raided HYBE's Seoul headquarters across June and July 2025, a travel ban followed in August 2025, and Bang was summoned for questioning five times between September and November 2025. A court froze KRW 156.8 billion of his HYBE shares that November. Police applied for an arrest warrant on April 21 and again on April 30, and prosecutors returned both without either reaching a court.

Bang and HYBE have denied the allegations throughout. The company has said its underwriters and outside legal advisers all treated the earn-out as a contract between particular shareholders that caused no loss to ordinary shareholders and required no disclosure. His lawyers told the Associated Press it was regrettable that officers sought an arrest "despite our full and consistent cooperation with the investigation over an extended period."

Timing matters here for reasons outside the case. On October 2 the Prosecution Service is abolished and replaced by the Public Prosecution Office and the Serious Crimes Investigation Agency, and from that date prosecutors lose the power to question suspects directly in referred cases. That leaves roughly a month to review the file under current rules. Hong rejected the suggestion that police had held the case back until the new system arrived.

The legal pressure has run alongside growth. HYBE posted revenue of KRW 1.45 trillion in the second quarter of 2026, up 105.5% year on year in what it called a record quarter, with concert revenue up 243.3% on the back of the BTS tour that launched in April, a group whose other headlines this year have been about pulling its music from the Grammys. Prosecutors will decide whether to indict once they have the police file, and the pop company's shareholders will be watching the calendar as closely as the charge sheet.