South Korea's Constitutional Court plans to hold its first public hearing next month in GC Biopharma's challenge to a fine over alleged vaccine bid-rigging, the first case seeking to overturn a court ruling to be referred to the court's full bench.
The Constitutional Court said on the 1st that it had set the hearing for 3 p.m. on the 7th of next month in the case the drugmaker filed against the Supreme Court. The date was set about four months after the case was referred to the full bench in April. It is the first time a hearing date has been set in a case seeking to overturn a court ruling.
The court sent advance notice of the hearing date to Yulchon LLC, which represents GC Biopharma, and to the Fair Trade Commission as an interested party along with its counsel, the Government Legal Service. It also notified the justice minister and the head of the National Court Administration. Which parties will be required to attend has not yet been determined, and the court is expected to go through procedures such as designating expert witnesses. "This is the advance notice stage, and we typically notify the parties again two weeks before the hearing," a court official said.
GC Biopharma, a joint distributor in the domestic vaccine supply market, received a corrective order and a fine of 2 billion won from the Fair Trade Commission over allegations including collusion in three vaccine purchase tenders issued by the Korea Disease Control and Prevention Agency between April 2017 and January 2019.
The company filed an administrative suit contesting the penalty, but the Supreme Court dismissed its appeal on February 12 without a review of the merits. Under that procedure, which does not apply to criminal cases, the top court can dismiss an appeal without examining the substance if it finds the grounds for appeal do not meet statutory requirements. In a separate criminal case over the vaccine bid-rigging allegations, the Supreme Court upheld an acquittal.
In March, GC Biopharma petitioned the Constitutional Court to overturn the ruling, arguing that under the Act on Special Cases Concerning Procedure for Appeal to the Supreme Court, the appeal could not be dismissed without a review of the merits and that its constitutional right to a trial had been violated. A three-justice panel of the Constitutional Court then deliberated on the petition and referred the case to the full bench on April 28, the first such referral in a case seeking to overturn a court ruling.
