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| The Fair Trade Commission building in the government complex in Sejong City, Choongcheong Province |
By Kim Tae-jong
The nation's anti-trust watchdog is redefining its roles. The strong advocate of fair market competition is now also making efforts to protect customers and promote fair trade between small and large enterprises.
"The Fair Trade Commission (FTC), contrary to other competition authorities abroad, is playing various roles," FTC Vice Chairman Kim Hak-hyun said during the Fair Trade Commission Forum hosted by The Korea Times at Seoul Plaza Hotel in Seoul, Tuesday. "(Our first mission is) to regulate anticompetitive agreement or merger and acquisitions and abuse of market positions."
In this regard, he asked CEOs and executives from foreign and Korean firms to sincerely cooperate with FTC's investigation but also promised to positively listen to their opinions and suggestions about regulations and take them into consideration to improve the practice of law enforcement.
He also stressed that the FTC has seen growing demand for its role to protect customers with its main focus on correcting business practices that can violate consumers' rights such as false advertising and abusive terms and conditions.
But he noted that the commission basically has no specific regulations intervening in legitimate business policies such as price, which he said should be set through fair market principles.
He also said that the FTC is also focusing on the promotion of fair trade between small and large companies.
But there have also been growing concerns over FTC's alleged excessive regulations. In particular, market insiders think it has recently increased investigations with the objective of reaching a goal for a fixed amount of fines.
In fact, there were allegations that FTC has set out to increase the total amount of fines by 15 percent this year, compared to the previous year.
But Kim said the FTC has no financial goal in terms of a revenue targets through imposing fines.
Contrary to such concerns from enterprises here, he stressed that the final amount of annual fines that the FTC collected has been decreasing ― about 600 billion won in 2011, 500 billion won in 2012 and 40 billion won in 2013.
"We didn't have an intention to reduce the amount of total fines that we collected in the past three years and actually we don't have a goal for the amount of fines. We simply launch an investigation if necessary and levy fines on violators. Of course, we don't have any specific target, either," Kim said.
As he introduced various roles of his organization, he explained that the FTC is a "quasi-judicial collegiate" administrative agency, as it is a unique administrative organization with all the functions of policymaking, investigation, deliberation and decision.
"On policymaking, in exercising the President's right to present a new or revised bill or to enact a presidential decree, the FTC draws up the laws or presidential decrees that the FTC enforces," he said.
"FTC investigates illegality of a case and brings in an investigation report. Then the commission deliberates and determines the degree of illegality of the case. Appealing against a decision made by the KFTC, appeal to the Seoul High Court is possible."
But he said the FTC is basically taking a stance to support free market principles, which is why the agency has long advocated parallel imports.
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