Bid Rigging - Japan

Japan

Although both a violation of Japanese criminal law and the Japan Anti-Monopoly Law, bid rigging is still a habitual practice of the Japanese construction industry. It has been shown by a number of academic studies both in Japan and in the USA to be a system which considerably inflates the cost of construction projects, and in the Japanese public sector, considerably wasteful of annual tax money amounting to billions of Japanese yen. The US Government, specifically the United States Trade Representative Office and Department of Commerce, made fierce efforts in the late 1980s and early 1990s to urge the Japanese government to scrap "Dango" as a de facto non-tariff barrier to foreign firms in the Japanese construction market. Despite years of negotiations, including promises by the Japanese government in the S.I.I. (Structural Impediment Initiative) trade talks, the practice was never fully stamped out and continued to flourish.

In 2006, Tadahiro Ando the then governor of Miyazaki Prefecture, resigned over a series of bid rigging allegations and was subsequently sentenced to over three years in jail

As of 2008 thirteen lawsuits were still pending over 1990s' bid rigging for local government contracts to supply incinerator plants.