Indicted over the maglev bid-rigging — and denying that it was collusion (2018)

The author’s view

There was a logic of its own to Taisei’s denial: on the projects that mattered most, it had lost. In a peculiar form of tendering where both the winner and the price rest on the client’s discretion, at what point does exchanging information become illegal collusion? The attempt to have that line drawn in court can be read as raising a question different from mere defiance. The distance between Taisei and the two firms that admitted the charge and hurried to close the matter was also a difference in how they saw the facts.

Even so, the company itself acknowledged that order co-ordination had taken place, and the weight of that remains: at the height of record profits, the arrangement by which difficult work was shared out had not broken down. Choosing to fight from inside rather than open the matter to outside investigation also, apart from the case argued in court, deferred the chance to release the company from the closed logic of its industry. How that decision has worked on the rebuilding of trust is something still to be judged against the orders it wins and the way it is actually governed.