South Korea's antitrust regulator enforcing competition law, investigating cartels and unfair trade, and overseeing consumer protection.
Korea's Fair Trade Commission sent investigators to Daesang, Ottogi and CJ CheilJedang on Oct. 14 over possible price collusion in six food categories. The conduct under review goes back to 2018, and the unit doing the reviewing is temporary, with a mandate that ends in 2028.
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Fair Trade Commission data show 22 Korean funeral firms that closed or lost registration in five years held 566.17 billion won in prepayments. The one loss estimate reported, for Agape Life, is about 4.5 billion won of the 11.2 billion won it collected.
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Four Korean food makers, led by Samyang and CJ CheilJedang, carry 1.19 trillion won in cartel fines for sugar, flour and starch pricing. Samyang, fined 435.38 billion won, had 210.3 billion won waived in August through leniency.
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Korea's Fair Trade Commission is probing BHC, BBQ and Kyochon for possible price fixing after broilers fell 37.7% and chicken stayed near 23,000 won. At Korea Broiler Council prices the cheaper bird saves roughly 1,700 to 2,100 won a chicken, money that sits either with stores or with the headquarters that supply them.
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Korea's Fair Trade Commission accuses SK Energy and HD Hyundai Oilbank of four years of fuel price sharing, with fines of up to about 4.6 trillion won. The bill turns on how the commission prices that sharing, the conduct behind most of the 44.1 trillion won in related sales.
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Naver Financial and Dunamu pushed their share swap to March 31, 2027, a third three-month delay that leaves the close 274 days past its first target. The companies say Korea's antitrust and financial-sector reviews now decide the date.
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Coupang is suing South Korea's Fair Trade Commission for seven days' written notice, after the agency gave none in 701 on-site inspections since 2023. The case turns on one retail law's absence from an exemption list, so a win would touch only the inspections run under it.
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Korean courts granted 31 of 39 corporate requests this year to suspend Fair Trade Commission decisions, against a 61.4% rate over the prior decade. What companies win is time before sanctions apply, and what that time is worth depends on how the main lawsuits end.
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Culture minister Choi Hwi-young says JYP Entertainment will hand its 50% domestic Phenomenon trademark stake to a festival corporation due in October. For JYP investors, the governance question is the price of a handover by a company whose chief co-chairs the committee behind the event.
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Korea's Fair Trade Commission and ruling party want power to seek suspension or deregistration of firms that price-fix twice in five years. In 17 industries including oil refining and pharma, a second cartel would threaten a firm's right to operate even if the first earned leniency.
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Korea's Fair Trade Commission and ruling party plan to let ministries pull registrations of firms in 17 industries that collude twice in five years. For refiners and drugmakers, a second cartel finding would put the right to operate at stake on top of heavier fines.
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Korea's arms procurement agency says Hanwha, now KAI's second-largest shareholder, faces a full merger review if it puts directors on the board. That puts the deal's regulatory cost on the step from shareholder to controller.
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A filing platform's error ten minutes before deadline bought students sixty extra minutes. Korea's Education Ministry now says it will review the whole college application system. Students who filed on time are protesting.
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Coupang and Hanwha have taken Fair Trade Commission investigations to court before any ruling, and courts have provisionally frozen an inspection decision and a document order. The FTC says it will prove the legality of its actions in the main proceedings.
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Samyang, Sajo Dongaone, Daehan Flour Mills and TS Corporation have had payment and price-rollback orders put on hold, and the trials that decide whether the money is owed will turn on which sales the FTC counted.
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A Seoul Economic Daily column lists four Korean digital rules the U.S. has asked Seoul to change, among them the CSAP cloud certification and the requirements for moving personal and location data overseas.
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A lawyer who advises on merger filings writes that overlap from repeated bolt-ons builds faster than deal teams price it, and that a remedy can force the sale of an asset sitting in another of the sponsor's funds.
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The regulator wanted to know who paid for Coupang's price-matching coupons. It got a lawsuit instead, and left the site four days before its own inspection window closed.
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The Supreme Court confirmed the FTC's order against GS Retail, accepting that paperwork alone does not make a return voluntary. The burden in Korean retail moves from forms to evidence.
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Korean ceremony costs average 21.4 million won, and 33.39 million in Gangnam. NongHyup transaction data show the pass-through landing on guests, whose average cash gift rose 6.9% in two years.
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