The woman who stepped up to make the final acceptance speech when Bong Joon-ho’s satire Parasite -– about the gap between rich and poor –- won the Oscar for Best Picture is herself a member of South Korea’s wealthiest family.

Miky Lee, an heiress turned media mogul, is the executive producer of the first non-English-language film to secure the Academy Awards’ top prize in their 92-year history.

The film has been praised at home and abroad for its critique of inequality, but Lee is the granddaughter of Lee Byung-chul, the founder of the giant Samsung group — by far the largest of the family-controlled, often-controversial conglomerates known as chaebol that dominate business in the world’s 12th-largest economy.

She is the vice chairwoman of the CJ Group, a food and entertainment giant that was spun out of Samsung in the 1990s as the empire was divided between different arms of the family.

Chaebol families are often intimately connected with South Korea’s political class, and her cousin is Lee Jae-yong, the Samsung Electronics vice-chairman currently on trial for bribing former president Park Geun-hye in a corruption scandal that saw her ousted from power.

But Miky Lee herself was secretly blacklisted by Park’s conservative government after she invested in a film based on the life of left-leaning president Roh Moo-hyun.