The National Assembly passed nearly 100 bills on Tuesday, the final day of an extraordinary session, including one calling for restrictions on transactions between subsidiaries of conglomerates, or chaebol.
The revision to the anti-monopoly and fair trade act, one of the 98 bills approved, bans chaebol from unfairly favoring their subsidiaries in awarding contracts. It is part of an "economic democratization" campaign being pushed by President Park Geun-hye's government to curb conglomerates' abuse of power.
Other economic bills include one that calls for allowing the National Tax Service (NTS) to use some of the financial transaction information kept in the Korea Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) for tax audits, a measure aimed at bringing more of the underground economy into the tax net.
The NTS has so far been banned from using the FIU information due to privacy concerns.
The Park government is trying to bring the underground economy above ground as Park seeks to raise as much funds as possible to finance a string of expensive projects she promised to carry out during last year's presidential election campaign. (Yonhap News)
