Jake Kwan

It was always considered too little to prevent this problem.

And every year, it seems that we have headlines of companies perhaps colluding with their competitors to engage in price fixing.

There has also been a few high-profile cases of large companies kind of throwing their weight around with their smaller suppliers and involving themselves and telling these smaller suppliers to share their trade secrets with

or to tell them whether they can engage with any other companies or not, dictating what they should do with their businesses.

So there has been this growing notion that the government needs to really up the punishment to prevent these things from happening.

So the new president is saying that the fine needs to be at a level where these companies believe that rule-breaking will lead to their ruin.

I mean, the new president, his message since he got into the office, you know, after the martial law has been that Korea is now open for business, that everything is going back to normal again.

This is a thriving democracy with a free market.

Now, the second part that

President Lee Jae-myung, he has to raise the economy.

This is his main agenda.

Since COVID, the country, the economy has been quite stagnant, and he has a local election coming up next year, which will be very, very important for him.

So one thing he wants to really do is buoy the stock market.

And one way he could do that in a very short term is to introduce all kinds of market reforms to really deliver the message that South Korea is a fair place to do business and to invest.

And that market also had somewhat responded to this messaging.

I mean, if you look at Korea's main market index, KOSPI, it went up 75% this year, which is an astounding number.

It beat out all the major markets around the world.

So for Mr. Lee, this is a winning move, and we can expect Mr. Lee to continue in this path.

Coupang had said it's sorry, but the police probe is just starting.

Officers have launched a search and seizure operation to grab evidence from Kupang's main office in Seoul.