Since the 1950s, the monstrous South Korean chaebol industrial empires have been the engine-rooms of the country's economy, their businesses revered, their leaders treated like gods.

And when the chaebols' darker sides have been exposed in huge bribery and corruption scandals, the men at the top have been forgiven with impressive speed.

Corruption is an acknowledged part of business life. This is a country where the size of bribes paid by one conglomerate to a political party in 2005 created the popular term “cash trucking”.

Prison sentences for chaebol chieftains have been light and the convicted chairmen have casually made the return journey from jail cell to boardroom.

All of which made yesterday's resignation of Lee Kun Hee the biggest corporate shock that South Korea can remember. Some called it tantamount to an abdication.

Mr Lee has been in trouble with the law before. In the 1990s, he was found guilty of bribing two South Korean presidents, although he was pardoned by a third.

Yet even to a public hardened to this sort of thing, the suddenness of his departure is a shock.

Mr Lee is one of the country's richest men and there are plenty who believe him more influential in South Korea than the President.

He is also responsible for putting Samsung on the world map, for which Koreans adore him.

When he took over at Samsung 21 years ago, the Olympic Games were being held the following year in Seoul.

The country was developing but had only just emerged from a transition between military dictatorship and democracy and its companies were almost unknown.

That Samsung is now one of the world's biggest makers of mobile phones and its electronics outsell those of Japanese rivals have given both Samsung and Mr Lee a status that transcends even the generous public view taken of most chaebol.

The second aspect that makes the resignation extraordinary is that this was no underhanded attack by foreign regulators or jealous corporate rivals in Japan, China or the United States.

The allegations of a Samsung company lawyer prompted the official investigation and led to Mr Lee's downfall.

Perhaps most shocking of all is that the laying-low of South Korea's most prominent industrial titan has come only two months into Lee Myung Bak's presidency.

He was voted in on the promise of a business-friendly administration.

To a Seoul corporate world that had fondly imagined five years of benign government and generous concessions, this was not the start anyone had expected.

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