Korea’s antitrust regulator announced Thursday that it imposed $1 million (1.15 billion won) in fines on foreign plant engineering firms and their bid brokers over price-fixing to win bids.

According to the Fair Trade Commission, two foreign plant engineering firms and two bidding brokers breached competition laws to win overseas deals from a large Korean construction company.

The four players are Pall Korea Ltd of U.S.-based Pall Corporation, Germany-based Dahlman Industrial Group, IPEG ENG Ltd. and Clemens M. Nachmann GmbH.

Pall Korea was slapped with the heaviest fine of $614,000, followed by Dahlman’s $408,000. Their bid brokers, IPEG ENG and Clemens M. Nachmann GmbH were fined about $16,000 and $3,500, respectively, depending on the degree of involvement.

The FTC said that Pall Korea and Dahlman made a shadow deal to secure one of two deals to build filtering systems in an overseas plant of the Korean constructor.

Pall Korea offered a bid price that was slightly more than the price offered by Dahlman, and won the bid to set up the back-wash filter system on the Korean plant. In exchange, Dahlman did the same for the other deal.

“The penalty is the first case of punishing the bid brokers in addition to the firsthand bidding companies,” an official said in a statement.

He added that regulators will continue to keep a close eye on similar cartel cases in the bidding sector.

“We will strengthen the monitoring system on that matter and impose heavy penalty on such violations.”

By Chung Joo-won (joowonc@heraldcorp.com)