Korea's competition regulator wants to be able to order a company to sell assets in a cartel case, and to stop being the only body that can refer one for prosecution

Buried in the fourth line of the first section is a sentence that would change how a Korean antitrust case can end.

The Korea Fair Trade Commission said on Tuesday that it intends to introduce structural measures, naming the sale of equity stakes and the transfer of a business, as remedies for abuse of a dominant market position and for cartels. Korean competition cases have overwhelmingly ended in surcharges and corrective orders. Divestiture is the remedy that changes what a company is, rather than what it pays.

The commission set out the proposal in its plan for the second half of 2026, announced by its chair, Joo Byung-ki, at the state guest house in Seoul and published the same day.

The referral monopoly

The second structural item is the commission's own power.

Under Korean law the commission holds an exclusive right to refer competition offences for criminal prosecution, which means prosecutors cannot generally take a case the commission has not sent. The plan would break that. It proposes giving a direct referral right to central administrative agencies, to metropolitan and provincial governments, and to groups of citizens above a threshold the commission has not yet set, saying the number will be decided during amendment of the enforcement decree after public discussion. Each body would have to run a referral review committee before using the power.

Provincial governments would also get investigative and disposition powers of their own in four fields: subcontracting, franchising, agency dealing, and labelling and advertising. The plan limits those to conduct that is easy to establish, giving the failure to hand over a contract as its example, and promises safeguards so that a province and the commission do not investigate the same firm twice.

Fines, and who pays them

The plan says the ceiling on surcharges will be raised sharply and the whole calculation rebuilt so that the size of the firm can be taken into account. It does not put a number on the new ceiling.

One penalty does carry a number, and it is aimed at an individual. Where a business group omits an affiliate from the data it files to be designated as a large business group, the commission wants to be able to fine the group head personally, up to 10 percent of the larger of two figures: the combined assets of the omitted affiliates, or their combined average annual sales.

Running the other way, the plan commits to legislating 44 criminal penalty items settled by a government-wide task force on rationalising economic offences, on the reasoning that Korea's criminal exposure is heavy against comparable countries.

Payment terms, holding companies, and hiring a team instead of buying it

Three items reach ordinary commercial practice.

Payment deadlines under the Large Retail Business Act would be cut by half. The current limits are 60 days for goods a retailer buys outright and 40 days for goods taken on consignment.

Holding companies face a tighter shareholding floor. The requirement now is 50 percent of an unlisted subsidiary and 30 percent of a listed one, and the plan would apply the 50 percent figure to listed companies in any new dual listing, with the stated aim of reducing the incentive to list a subsidiary alongside its parent.

The third is a merger control change written for artificial intelligence. The plan would bring within merger review the practice of absorbing a large number of key staff from another company without buying the company, which it calls a roundabout combination. The commission also intends to publish a policy report on the AI services market, naming ChatGPT, built on a survey of competition and trading conditions. Separately it will expand the set of shopping platforms it monitors with its own AI tools from eight to eleven.

Staff

The commission is growing. A first increase of 167 posts took effect in March and is to be filled by September. A second of 237 takes effect in October. The number of commissioners goes from nine to eleven.

Nothing here is in force. Every item is a stated intention requiring either legislation in the National Assembly or an amended enforcement decree, and the plan is explicit that at least one central number, the citizen threshold for a criminal referral, has not been decided.