The country’s major state-run enterprises are heavily in debt due to the previous administration’s massive, unviable construction and civil engineering projects, state auditors said Wednesday.

The Board of Audit and Inspection said in a report that their combined debts surged from 128 trillion won ($113 billion) in late 2007 to 284 trillion won in late 2011 when they were under Lee Myung-bak administration.

The state auditor inspected nine public firms and the three relevant ministries of finance, land and economy under the previous government for two months late last year.

The nine debt-saddled state-run companies were in charge of actualizing former President Lee’s ambitious stimulus schemes such as the four-river refurbishment project and construction of cheap government-financed apartments nationwide. They include Korea Electric Power Corp., Land and Housing Corp. (LH), the Korea Highway Corp., the Korea National Oil Corp. and K-Water.

The ministries pressed the public firms to carry out state projects with exaggerated profit estimates and did not provide some of them with adequate financing.

According to the BAI report, LH pushed ahead with the state-funded apartment project while paying little attention to the project’s feasibility and whether the company was financially capable of carrying out the plans. Some parts of the project have been canceled or delayed and this caused a greater loss for LH, officials said.

LH holds the largest amount of debt totaling 138.1 trillion won at the end of last year, up 5.8 percent from a year earlier.

K-Water is also deeply in debt because the company failed to get compensation from the central government for its investment in the four-river refurbishment project. This caused K-water’s debts to grow more than sixfold in four years to 1.3 trillion won in 2012, the report added.

The report came a day after President Park Geun-hye slammed previous administrations for neglecting irregularities at the nuclear power plants and unpaid fines by former President Chun Doo-hwan.

In an unusually strong tone, Park denounced previous administrations for not taking responsibility over collecting the former president’s 167 billion won fine, which he has refused to pay.

Calls for collecting the fine have been growing as the statute of limitations for the fine expires in October.

On the nuclear power scandal, Park also stressed the need to find out how the irregularities had been allowed to build up through the years.

President Park pledged in March that the government would look into the validity of the former government’s river refurbishment plan, on which more than 22 trillion won was spent over five years from 2008.

By Cho Chung-un (christory@heraldcorp.com)