Public Procurement Service Cancels Registration of Stockpile Material Users for 'Resale Prohibition Violation'

The Public Procurement Service (PPS) has canceled the registrations of 34 stockpile material user companies that violated the resale prohibition.

According to the PPS on the 24th, the Board of Audit and Inspection conducted an audit last year on the management of government stockpile materials, identifying 5 companies that resold stockpile materials and notifying the PPS of 88 companies suspected of resale.

Based on this, the PPS conducted an investigation and confirmed that resale occurred in 29 of the 88 suspected companies, while 34 companies were verified to have conducted normal transactions.

The total of 34 companies identified by the Board of Audit and Inspection and the PPS were found to have released stockpile materials worth 35.7 billion KRW over five years since 2017 and gained a profit of 244 million KRW through resale.

Accordingly, the PPS plans to cancel the registrations of the identified companies as stockpile material users and recover the entire resale profit to the national treasury in accordance with relevant regulations.

Additionally, for 25 companies that did not cooperate with the investigation and refused to submit documents, the PPS will cancel their registrations, suspend allocation of materials, and prohibit the use of PPS stockpile materials until the documents are submitted.

Currently, the PPS publicly stockpiles 225,000 tons of six types of non-ferrous metals, including aluminum, copper, and nickel. The stocked metals are released to domestic companies year-round to ensure stable operations.

However, stockpile material user companies are prohibited from reselling the stockpile materials supplied by the PPS to others without manufacturing or processing them.

Lee Jong-wook, Administrator of the PPS, stated, “The purpose of the PPS stockpile project is to enhance responsiveness in national supply chain crisis situations and support domestic manufacturing vulnerable to raw material crises. We will strive to eradicate unfair practices such as resale to ensure that the purpose and intent of the stockpile project are upheld.”

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