Kagawa builders rigged 90% of prefecture tenders for 3 years — JFTC fined 27 firms ¥442M

On June 25, 2026, Japan's Fair Trade Commission found 29 construction firms headquartered in Takamatsu, Kagawa, guilty of bid rigging (improper trade restriction) on the prefecture's civil-works tenders. Twenty-seven firms still in business were ordered to pay surcharges totaling ¥441.77 million; 20 of them also received exclusion orders to stop the practice and set up prevention measures. One firm, Tsubomi Kensetsu, escaped the surcharge by reporting the cartel under the JFTC's leniency program.

The collusion ran from May 2021 to September 2024 and covered 268 prefecture civil-works contracts with expected prices of ¥30 million or more — including coastal and river levees built for Nankai Trough earthquake and tsunami defense and new trunk-road construction. Pre-arranged winners were decided in more than 90% of those tenders, yielding about ¥12 billion in improperly secured orders.

The mechanism was openly territorial: Takamatsu was divided into four areas, and firms based where a project sat got first claim on the job. Each area had a coordinator who brokered the pre-bid agreement, while every other participant cooperated by bidding high or not bidding at all. The arranging meetings took place at the Kagawa civil-engineering construction association hall.

The sharpest fact is the repeat offense: most of these firms, including top-fined Murakami-gumi (¥30.55M), had already received JFTC exclusion recommendations in 2001, when about 160 firms were caught rigging Kagawa and Takamatsu public works and 134 paid roughly ¥1 billion combined. Kagawa's response then — switching from designated-invitation bidding to scored 'comprehensive evaluation' bidding — did not break the network that generated the collusion.

¥441.77M in JFTC surcharges — 4% of contracts won — on about ¥12B of orders secured through rigged bids; 20 firms under exclusion orders

Incumbent concentration: 27 local firms treated the prefecture's tender calendar as a shared quota, giving the site's 'home' firms priority regardless of price or competence.

The 2001 sanctions never dismantled the coordinators; years of shared meetings at the industry association hall kept the network alive until it re-formed under the new bidding rules.

Comprehensive-evaluation scoring rewarded track records and technical points that cartel members already held, so the reform calcified the very hierarchy collusion needed to allocate work.

Deterrence failed the second time: the 2001 fines read as a cost of doing business, and a quarter-century later the same firms were back arranging bids.

Kagawa reformed its bidding after the 2001 cartel case, and the same contractors learned to game the new scored system. Rules change faster than the trust networks they were meant to defeat.

The surcharge order set a payment deadline of January 26, 2027, with the largest single bill on Tozan Kensetsu at ¥35.24 million. Murakami-gumi said it would review the order and respond appropriately. Governor Ikeda Toyohito called the finding deeply regrettable, promised designation suspensions against the ordered firms and said the prefecture would work through industry groups to make procurement more transparent and competitive after the order is final. The JFTC's Shikoku office urged the industry never to repeat bid rigging.