It was found that Naver (formerly NHN) failed to practice some commitments initially made to the city council while illegally purchasing Seongnam city-owned site for building the Venture Tower.

When construction of a building on the site was complete, Naver suddenly gave up building the Venture Tower it promised, and has been using the building as its head office.

As a result, some even claim that Naver's sales contract for office building site is invalid.

According to the documents obtained by AsiaToday, Naver submitted 'NHN Venture Tower Construction Plan' to Seongnam city and Seongnam City Council back in October 2004. The plan presented five categories and 18 sub-categories to support Seongnam city.

The five categories for community support are the following: (a) employment enlargement, (b) establishment of educational-industrial relationship, (c) software development, (d) voluntary service expansion, and (e) adjacent development and support.

However, according to NHN's contract titled "NHN's Seongnam transfer agreement" with the city, two sub-categories, including 'enlarging employment of Seongnam citizen up to 40-50 percent of total employees', and 'Beautiful Foundation related activities' have been removed.

Among the other 16 sub-categories, only two of them, which are 'exclusion of entertainment venues', and 'minimizing traffic', were on the contract while the rest of them were changed in favor of the company. After announcing its plan to "support" the city, Naver later added the term "promote to support".

In particular, Naver initially promised to donate 5 percent of annual net profit to society and to mainly invest on Seongnam community. However, the company later changed to 'promote to invest mainly on Seongnam community with budget for social responsibility'.

An official from the city said, "It's been 10 years since we signed a contract (on the site for venture facilities) with Naver. Some say that the agreement degenerated compared to the original plan but we don't know how to cope with it since we don't know who was in charge of the contract."

Jang Yoon-Young, the former member of Seongnam City Council, said, "It seems like Lee Dae-Yeop, the former mayor of Seongnam city, already decided to sell the site to Naver and submitted the plan to the city council as a 'rite of passage'."

Jang claimed, "Fixing terms in an agreement that has been approved by the city council is fraud. The contract should be void."