Chaebol General Motors and Renault. The chaebol debts were not only to state industrial banks but also to independent banks and their own financial services subsidiaries. The scale of the loan defaults meant that banks could neither foreclose nor write off bad loans without themselves collapsing, so the failure to service these debts quickly caused a systemic banking crisis, and South Korea turned to the IMF for assistance. The most spectacular example came in mid-1999, with the collapse of the Daewoo Group, which had some US$80 billion in unpaid debt. At the time, it was the largest corporate bankruptcy in history.
Internet censorship in South Korea account operated by the North. In January 2011, a South Korean man was arrested for praising North Korea through social networking sites. South Korean president Lee Myung-bak's year 2011 policies include cracking down on pro-North Korean comments on social network sites like Facebook and Twitter. Reporters Without Borders noted that the government "has intensified" its campaign to censor pro-North Korea material in 2012, as well. The Government of South Korea practiced censorship of gay-content websites from 2001 to 2003, through its "Information and Communications Ethics Committee" (정보통신윤리위원회), an official organ of the Ministry of Information and Communication, under its category