Kim Nayun, Gwangju City Council Member, "Active Response to Litigation Work Needed to Prevent Waste of Public Funds"

Kim Na-yoon, Gwangju Metropolitan City Council Member. Photo by Gwangju Metropolitan City Council

[Asia Economy Honam Reporting Headquarters Reporter Park Seon-gang] Allegations have been raised that Gwangju Metropolitan City is lacking in its response to lawsuits in which it is a party.

Kim Na-yoon, a member of the Gwangju Metropolitan Council (Democratic Party, Buk-gu 6 Yangsan, Geon-guk, Sinyong), on the 31st during the Gwangju City Council plenary session's administrative questioning, stated, “Due to lawsuits that were not properly handled, citizens' tax money is being wasted, so an organic cooperation system within the administration must be established,” urging the Legal Affairs Office and each department to actively engage in litigation matters.

Since December 2013, when the Gwangju Metropolitan Police Agency detected illegal increase of freight vehicles in the industry through forgery and alteration of official documents and notified Gwangju City, a full investigation was conducted, and from February 2015 for 10 months, decisions to recover fuel subsidies and refusals to pay fuel subsidies were notified to each company.

In 2018, Gwangju City filed lawsuits claiming damages for illegal acts against representatives of 21 corporations delaying payment of fraudulent subsidy amounts, and among them, lawsuits for 17 cases were confirmed, but about 9 billion KRW out of the total 10.1 billion KRW in freight vehicle fuel subsidy recoveries have yet to be collected.

The Gwangju City Waterworks Headquarters also has more than 20 lawsuits related to the causative party burden charges, with the lawsuit amount exceeding 7 billion KRW, making countermeasures urgently needed.

The causative party burden charge is a cost borne partially or entirely by the person who caused the need for a specific construction project when such construction is carried out.

Recently, in lawsuits requesting cancellation of the imposition of waterworks causative party burden charges, rulings have continued that the payer of the causative party burden charge within large-scale housing development complexes is the land developer, not the building actor, resulting in multiple local governments having obligations to refund causative party burden charges previously imposed and collected from the original building owners who were the building actors.

Councilor Kim Na-yoon emphasized the importance of timely lawsuit responses, saying, “Depending on the case, we should not hesitate to form a proactive legal TF team.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.