“THE de facto dismantlement of the Samsung Group” was how South Korea’s semi-official news agency, Yonhap, spun the news on February 28th that the sprawling conglomerate would scrap its Future Strategy Office, a management organisation of some 200 senior staff, and devolve power to individual affiliates as part of broad reforms. The office had become for many South Koreans a vexing symbol of Samsung’s secretive goings-on.

Longtime Samsung-watchers were less impressed. The parallels with an earlier disbanding of the same office in 2008, when it was known as the Strategy and Planning Office, were striking. Then, Lee Kun-hee, Samsung’s chairman, had been indicted for his involvement in a multi-trillion-won slush-fund scandal. Then, too, the group closed down the office to show it was serious about reform. But by 2010 it was reborn as the Future Strategy Office.

Lee Kun-hee’s son and presumed heir to the Samsung empire, Lee Jae-yong (pictured), is the one now behind bars. This week he was indicted by a special prosecution team on charges of bribery and embezzlement. Prosecutors have accused him of paying 43bn won ($38m) to “cultural organisations” closely tied to Choi Soon-sil, a former confidante of South Korea’s president, Park Geun-hye.

In return he allegedly received state support for an important merger in July 2015 between two Samsung affiliates. The tie-up was viewed as essential to the smooth transfer of power between the 75-year-old Mr Lee, who has been in hospital since 2014, and his son. The family controls Samsung through a complex knot of cross-shareholdings between its 26 affiliates, which operate in businesses ranging from life insurance to smartphones. The younger Mr Lee has said he provided the funds, but denies any bribery.

The Future Strategy Office had come to represent the concentration of elite power that South Koreans are so fed up with, says Lee Jong-tae (no relation to Mr Lee) of SisaIN, a South Korean magazine. In the past, the office was said to have been vital in ensuring the family’s control. It managed relations with the government to that end.

Yet even its abolition serves the Lee dynasty. It is a pacifying move to try to “save” the young chieftain, says Lee Jong-tae. Mr Lee can now seek bail, and a court must rule within three months. Still, after his arrest, says Chang Sea-jin of the National University of Singapore, Mr Lee will have “neither the legitimacy nor the size of equity stake” to maintain the emperor-style management of his father (inheritance tax will slightly reduce the family’s stake).

Perhaps. The day-to-day running of Samsung will be little affected by the dissolution of the family’s most loyal body, because of the control still wielded by the Lee dynasty. Most people expect the key functions of the strategy office to be transferred to other parts of the group, most likely to three companies—Samsung C&T, Samsung Life Insurance and Samsung Electronics—in preparation for a long-anticipated transition to a more transparent holding-company structure. Shares in Samsung Electronics are trading at near record highs owing to strong results and optimism about the coming launch of the latest model of its main smartphone, the Galaxy S8.

The chief surprise this week was the mass resignation of the strategy office’s nine executives, including an old guard handpicked by the elder Mr Lee. Mr Chang suspects that this “corporate cleansing” will work in the younger Mr Lee’s favour. Some of the executives had become so powerful that they might have overshadowed him. The unit’s closure might both save the heir and make his return easier.