FTC Will Restrain from Investigation on 4 Major Groups

The Fair Trade Commission, anticipating that the domestic economy is getting worse by the U.S. war, decided not to carry out authoritative investigation on the 4 major groups and large businesses.

A related official of FTC revealed yesterday, ``as the government is operating an emergency economic measures responding to the current situation, [FTC] decided not to carry out authoritative investigations that might freeze the business activities.``

Hence, FTC will concentrate on the inspection on the 7 groups that have never had FTC`s investigation among the 30 groups and 30 state-owned business that are currently in the process of investigation. And FTC will not carry out additional inspections on the large businesses and state-owned businesses until the end of this year.

FTC already expressed, early this year, its decision to restrain from investigating on the illegal internal transaction of the 30 major groups during the first half of this year to ease the difficulties of the business companies that are struggling in the frozen economic situation.

The Investigation Bureau will decide the level of sanctions after completing the inspections on 7 groups that have been carrying out since July.

Lee Han-Eok, the director of Investigation Bureau in FTC, remarked, ``there is no plan for the investigation on the 4 major groups. But we are ready to carry out investigation when it is ordered by the higher officials.``

The Antitrust Bureau that is in charge of the investigation on the illegal internal transaction also will not begin an additional investigation until the end of this year. Oh Seung-Hwan, director of Antitrust Bureau, also said ``it is timely and urgent to complete the on-going investigations into the 30 local state-owned business. It would be difficult to do more investigations on the central state-owned business in the year because the time is running out.``

Meanwhile, when announcing the result of the illegal internal transaction of the 4 major groups last year, FTC stated that ``the large business are employing more wise tricks for the internal transactions. FTC will trace them to the end and eliminate all the illegal internal transaction by establishing an investigation team for the offshore funds.``

yhchoi65@donga.com