When completed, the Lotte tower, which reached the 103rd floor this month, will give the conglomerate bragging rights to the tallest building on the Korean Peninsula. It will be higher than the current tallest building in South Korea, the 305-meter Northeast Asia Trade Tower in Incheon, west of Seoul, and the tallest building in North Korea, the unfinished 330-meter Ryugyong Hotel in Pyongyang.

(Lotte’s title will not last all that long. The Hyundai Motor Group, another chaebol, disclosed plans last month to build a 571-meter tower, to be called the Global Business Center, in Seoul by 2022.)

Lotte said its complex would create 20,000 new jobs and attract 50 million visitors a year, including 4 million tourists from abroad.

But the project stirred controversy from Day 1.

It took Lotte 15 years to win a building permit, obtaining it only after agreeing to shoulder the cost of changing the angle of a military runway south of Seoul, so that the tower would not stand in the way of fighter jets approaching the airfield. The deal was criticized as the latest reminder of the chaebol influence, so powerful that detractors said it could even sway the military in a country still technically at war with North Korea.

Construction began in 2010. As the tower rose, so did the land prices around it.

But doubts developed about the project, especially after the South Korean ferry Sewol sank in April last year, killing 304 people and deepening public mistrust in the government’s safety policies.

Investigators revealed collusive ties between the ferry operator and regulators, as well as widespread negligence around safety rules, that enabled the dangerously overloaded ship to set sail with hundreds of teenagers on board. Its crew abandoned its passengers, and there were few functioning life rafts. The South Korean Coast Guard failed to mount an effective rescue operation.