Compensation Paid for Land Excluded from Business Area
Illegal and Improper Handling of Local Public Enterprises Uncovered
Shin Dae-kyung, Deputy Head of the Government Joint Anti-Corruption Promotion Team, is announcing the results of the inspection on the implementation status of local public enterprise projects at the Government Seoul Office Building in Jongno-gu, Seoul, on the afternoon of the 15th. [Image source=Yonhap News]
The government conducted an on-site inspection of projects promoted by local public enterprises under local governments and uncovered 80 cases of illegal and inappropriate handling of affairs, including the expenditure of tens of billions of won in compensation on private land outside the project area.
The Joint Government Corruption Prevention Task Force selected 5 out of 16 public enterprises under metropolitan local governments implementing large-scale development projects as inspection targets and, together with the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, inspected the project implementation status for five months. On the 15th, they announced that a total of 80 inappropriate cases (955 detailed cases) were detected.
The local public enterprises subject to inspection are Busan Urban Corporation, Daejeon Urban Corporation, Daegu Urban Development Corporation, Gangwon Development Corporation, and Gwangju Metropolitan City Urban Corporation.
The task force detected 8 cases of 'inappropriate planning and design,' including cases where the selection process of new technology and patented construction methods was improperly operated to provide preferential treatment favorable to specific companies.
They also uncovered 14 cases of 'inappropriate ordering and contracting,' such as contracting with companies that are not registered in construction or lack qualifications, and splitting construction volumes to avoid competitive bidding, known as 'split private contracts.'
Additionally, there were 6 cases of 'inappropriate compensation,' including executing budgets without legal grounds for resident support projects unrelated to fishermen's damage to resolve complaints, and unnecessarily paying compensation for land excluded from the project area.
Other cases included 34 instances of 'inappropriate project management,' such as carrying out additional construction like retaining wall installation on private land where sales were completed, resulting in budget waste, and 18 cases of 'poor facility management and operation,' such as inadequate seismic performance management of public facilities owned by local public enterprises.
During the investigation, it was revealed that Local Government A planned the discharge point of a public sewage treatment facility differently from the basic sewage maintenance plan and changed it belatedly. When collective complaints arose, they conditioned the resolution of complaints on paying complaint handling costs without legal grounds through the local public enterprise.
In the case of Local Public Enterprise B, they unnecessarily spent a total of 2.6 billion won in compensation without clearly confirming with the local government whether to compensate for 8 private land parcels excluded from the project area.
The task force plans to take actions such as filing complaints (33 cases), business suspension (8 cases), and fines (53 cases) for the detected illegal acts, and to recover 7.7 billion won of inappropriately executed funds.
The government decided to disseminate the identified issues at each project stage, related laws, and administrative regulations to all local public enterprises to prevent recurrence of similar cases.
The government explained, "We will regularly inspect the implementation status of institutional improvement tasks and follow-up measures by each institution based on the results of this local public enterprise project implementation inspection to ensure that illegal and inappropriate cases do not recur."
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