INCHEON — Incheon's vehicle license plate issuance business, monopolized by a single company for 45 years, has been awarded to what are effectively the same father-and-son firms even after the city switched to open bidding, triggering allegations of favoritism. The controversy widened after it emerged that the city ignored an ordinance delegating the work to district offices and instead ran a review committee that had no legal basis to pick the winners.
Cho Sung-min, a member of the Incheon Metropolitan Council, held a news conference at Incheon City Hall on the 9th and condemned the selection as illegal, saying the process for choosing license plate issuance agents "destroyed fair competition and directly violated both the law and city ordinances."
The city had delayed acting on a government recommendation to break up the monopoly held by one company since 1981, and only in April expanded the tender to two agents covering two districts.
The outcome, however, has turned into a dispute over a business being handed down within one family, undercutting the stated goal of ending the monopoly. Company A, ranked first, and Company B, ranked second, in the final selection in May are run by a father and his son, and were found to be related parties that hold cross-shareholdings in each other and are linked through real estate collateral.
The two companies sit on adjoining lots within the same business site in Hagik-dong, Michuhol District, where both the land and buildings are owned by the father's company. A mortgage with a maximum claim of 780 million won has been placed on the father's company's property to secure debt owed by the son's company, underscoring how closely the two are financially intertwined.
The arrangement contrasts sharply with how other local governments run the system. Seoul has written the method of designating agents, detailed evaluation criteria and rules for establishing a review committee into its ordinance, closing the legal gaps. Gimpo, in Gyeonggi Province, has also set disqualification clauses that restrict duplicate applications by relatives under civil law or by overlapping executives, heading off any room for favoritism.
Incheon, by contrast, put in place no provision to exclude related parties. The city also invited questions about the fairness of its scoring: the bidder that offered the lowest fee — the category worth 50 of the 100 total points — was pushed down to third place and eliminated.
The procedural flaws are also serious. Because the city's ordinance on delegated affairs assigns the authority to designate plate issuance agents to each district chief, critics say the city's decision to run the tender directly under the mayor's name, without amending the ordinance, amounts to an invalid act under Supreme Court precedent. The "agent designation review committee" that picked the winners was itself hastily created under a "mayoral policy" with no basis in either legislation or city ordinance.
Fees from the city's plate issuance business totaled 16.5 billion won over the four years from 2022 to 2025, meaning monopoly revenue of around 4 billion won a year has been concentrated in one family. The eliminated bidder has filed an administrative lawsuit, arguing that the neutrality of the review collapsed.
Cho said the case was "a grave defect that can never be overlooked, granting privileges to a particular father-and-son business by placing a mayoral policy above the law and ordinances." He called on the city to "conduct a fresh legal review of this selection process and correct a 45-year-old practice by amending the ordinance to exclude related parties and give the review committee a legal footing."
An Incheon city official said the matter "is currently the subject of an administrative lawsuit," adding that the city "will review the legal issues and actively pursue improvements if there are areas where the system needs to be fixed."
