This article was displayed on the ChosunBiz RM Report site at 5:55 p.m. on Feb. 5, 2026.
President Lee Jae-myung said this on Feb. 3 at a Cabinet meeting after receiving a report from prosecutors on the results of an investigation into collusion. The point is that the penalty surcharge and criminal punishment for colluding corporations are so weak that corporations repeatedly engage in collusion. Legal sources note that unless the unjust gains from collusion are recovered, it will be difficult to prevent structural recidivism.
In reality, however, unjust gains are rarely recovered in collusion cases. The reason is that it is hard at the trial stage to specifically identify the profits earned through collusion. There is growing demand for urgent institutional reforms to ensure the effective recovery of unjust gains from colluding corporations.
◇ The biggest hurdle is "specifying the amount" of unjust gains from collusion
According to legal sources on the 5th, the current Monopoly Regulation and Fair Trade Act has no clear provision allowing confiscation or collection of unjust gains or criminal proceeds from collusion. As a result, inside and outside the prosecution, there is discussion of applying the Act on Special Cases Concerning the Confiscation and Return of Property Acquired through Corrupt Practices to recover the profits obtained through collusion.
The problem is that it is not easy to specify the criminal proceeds from collusion. In fact, case law indicates that criminal confiscation or collection for collusive acts has been extremely rare.
A representative example is bid rigging. The unjust gains from bid rigging can be seen as the difference between the "normal winning bid price that would have formed absent collusion" and the "winning bid price formed through collusion." But because the price absent collusion can only be estimated, there is a limitation in that a concrete calculation at the level required in criminal trials is difficult.
A prosecution official said, "During trial, when the corporations challenge the calculation of gains by citing other variables such as exchange rate fluctuations or rising labor costs, courts often decline recovery on the grounds that precise specification is difficult."
◇ OECD: "15% of colluding corporations' sales are unjust gains"
Then how did prosecutors calculate unjust gains in the flour price-fixing case that was sent to trial on the 2nd?
Prosecutors explain that they calculated unjust gains in three ways. First, they treated the entire increase in flour prices after collusion as the result of collusion and calculated it as the gains. Regardless of price rises or falls, they counted all price fluctuations formed after collusion was confirmed as profits causally linked to collusion.
Second, excluding the rise in the price of wheat— which accounts for 60% to 70% of flour prices— they calculated only the excess increase beyond the cost rise as unjust gains.
Lastly, they analyzed the gap between flour sales prices and imported wheat prices to estimate the amount of profit. Using these methods, prosecutors estimate the unjust gains at at least in the hundreds of billions of won.
Some say it is necessary to refer to the method of calculating unjust gains under the Financial Investment Services and Capital Markets Act.
The Financial Investment Services and Capital Markets Act, considering the difficulty of proving unjust gains in market-disrupting acts such as stock price manipulation, specifies concrete methods for calculating unjust gains in its enforcement decree. Likewise, for collusion crimes, legislative supplementation is needed to allow profits to be calculated according to certain standards, in light of the limits of calculating normal prices.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) assumes that 15% of colluding corporations' sales are unjust gains. Applying this yields an estimated unjust gain of about 898.6 billion won for the milling companies.
A prosecution official said, "Under the current system, the gaps in the law are so large that collusion offenses are bound to be repeated," adding, "Along with raising statutory penalties, there need to be institutional improvements to clarify the standards for recovering unjust gains."