LH, whose access to development information remains, took a picture of a PC screen with a phone

Experts are surprised at the new city’s suspicion of speculation in the land, which seems to maximize compensation by using tricks such as’planting rare trees’ by an employee of the Korea Land and Housing Corporation (LH). Experts diagnose that the fact that many employees are involved in allegations of land speculation is directly related to the company’s culture and personality.

LH is a public company created by the merger of Korea Land Corporation and Korea Housing Corporation in October 2009. It carries out the entire process from housing site development or urban development to housing sales. Their main job is to develop land and sell houses.

Compensation work, which is considered the front-line department with the greatest number of complaints, is assigned to new employees first. In general, ten-year-old employees can assume that they have worked on compensation for about four years. Because of this, even new employees have a wealth of knowledge about the land.

An LH employee who requested anonymity said, “The main topic is about real estate investment when you have a dinner with close friends from the beginning. If there was no extra money, three or four people gathered to buy it together and bury it,” he said.

Currently, more than 10,000 people work for this company. Among these, the departments that can know the new city development information in advance are largely about the departments that determine candidate sites for new cities or promote development, and departments that handle land compensation after the candidate sites are determined. The New Town Business Department works with the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport and local governments to select candidate sites for new cities and determine development sites among them. You can literally get related information early. Compensation work is a structure that most of the employees, except for key executives, know immediately after the new city is designated.

Whenever an employee in charge of a new city business unit or a compensation business accesses a PC to view related information, a log of access is left. Employees in charge of business related to the new town also make a confidentiality pledge not to disclose information. However, this is the only safety device that prevents speculation using the employee’s internal information. Information can be easily removed by simply taking a picture of a PC screen with a smartphone.

In fact, in 2018, an incident occurred in which the development drawings of the Wonheung district in Goheung were leaked, and a smartphone was also mobilized at that time. The LH staff sent the development plan related to the Wonheung district by messenger to the LH military advisory committee, after which military officials took pictures of the drawings and data were leaked. The leaked drawings were even published on the Internet. However, at the time, the discipline received by the relevant staff was at the level of’warning’.

Although there is a clause in the LH regulation’prohibition of the use of undisclosed development information’, no employee has been caught or punished based on this clause in the past 10 years. The punishment rule is also’self-discipline based on internal regulations’. Public finance companies are prosecuted to the prosecution when such facts are discovered.

Hwang Yong-sik, a professor of business administration at Sejong University, said, “LH’s’corruption insensitivity’ organizational culture that closes the eyes of quite a bit of corruption has raised the problem.”

Reporter Choi Hyun-joo [email protected]