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[Lawsuit for cancellation of a disposition of Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power imposing a bidding participation restriction on the Client] Cancellation of the disposition in the Client’s favor.


1. Background
Company “A”, engaged in software development and services business (“Client”), and another company “B” participated in 2 biddings organized by Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power in 2014. The Client as a bidding winner entered into 2 services agreements. Later then, the Korea Fair Trade Commission viewed that the Company B’s formative bidding participance was an act of anticompetitive collusion to make the results of biddings unavoidable. Accordingly, the Korea Fair Trade Commission issued a corrective order to the Client and imposed a fine of 21 million won, and Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power issued a disposition to ban the Client from participating in the biddings for two years, asserting that the Client was “a person who won the bids by means of anticompetitive collusion”. Therefore, the Client filed a lawsuit for cancellation of the disposition on bidding participation restriction.

2. Our Value
Within a litigation case for cancellation of a disposition imposing a bidding participation restriction, we were able to bring out a judgment recognizing the establishment of a bid rigging by the organizer.

3. Significance
In the judgment, the court ruled, “the rigging in this case was caused by the defendant’s request for preventing the bidding failure since the defendant was worried about the risk that the schedule for the second bidding would be disrupted due to the earlier unsuccessful outcome of the plaintiff’s sole participance in the first bidding process”. The court confirmed the fact that the bidding organizer itself was involved in the anticompetitive collusion and recognized the deviation and abuse of discretion by the bidding organizer.
Although the court did not recognize the plaintiff's argument about the absence of a cause for disposition, by stating, "even if the bidding organizer requested to prevent the unsuccessful bidding, such a circumstance cannot justify the anticompetitive collusion", this judgment is significant as it confirmed revocability of the disposition of a bidding participation restriction in case the bidding organizer is involved in a bid rigging case (by way of requesting for cooperation, etc.).