The criteria for judging whether a large group has unfairly deprived the heads of families and others of their jobs will be relaxed.

The Fair Trade Commission announced that it will revise the examination guidelines for acts that provide unfair profits to related persons under the Fair Trade Act and will take effect from tomorrow (22nd).

According to the Fair Trade Act, domestic companies belonging to disclosed corporate groups with assets of 5 trillion won or more must not provide unfair profits to other affiliates in which the total number of employees and their relatives hold more than 20% of the shares, such as driving jobs or providing business opportunities.

Until now, the FTC has held that if it falls under the prohibited acts listed in the law and as a result, unfair profits are attributed to the total number of families, there is no need to prove unfairness.

However, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the corporations in the case of the elimination of jobs by large corporations such as Hanjin Group and Hite Jinro, saying that the unfairness should be weighed according to "whether there is a risk of maintaining and deepening the concentration of economic power centered on specially related persons through irregular wealth transfers."

This does not mean that fair trade will be hampered by restrictions on market competition or concentration of economic power, but it must be proven to be unfair.

In accordance with the Supreme Court's judgment, the FTC has specified in its guidelines the criteria for determining unfairness, such as the relationship between the providing entity, the object, and the related person, the purpose, intention, and circumstances of the act, the economic situation of the providing object, the size of the transaction, and the size and duration of the profit attributable to the related person.

In addition, the existing review guidelines have changed the requirement to meet both the "comparison with other operators" or "reasonable consideration" requirements to ensure that only one of the two needs to be met.

In addition, the areas that are recognized as exceptions when there is an effect of increasing efficiency or when urgency is required have been relaxed or specified in accordance with the intent of the statute, and specific exceptions have been added to the guidelines.