The prosecution conducted raids on Wednesday as part of their probe into suspicions that eleven architecture firms colluded in apartment construction supervision tenders.

The Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office sent investigators to eleven venues to seize materials, including the offices of said companies and residences of the firms’ employees.

Prosecutors suspect that the companies violated the Fair Trade Act by rigging the bids in the process of securing tenders for supervisory services in construction projects issued by the state-run Korea Land and Housing Corporation(LH) and the Public Procurement Service between 2019 and last year.

Most of the eleven firms were found to have a former LH employee on their staff.

Given that the bids won by the firms were each worth billions of won, prosecutors believe that the amount of money involved in the collusion stands in the range of hundreds of billions of won.

Prosecutors suspect that such collusion led to inadequate construction management and supervision of apartments, which in turn resulted in structural deficiencies at complexes built by LH.