Antimonopoly Compliance: Review of Foreign Practice. Part I

The article contains the best foreign practices of implementing the of antimonopoly compliance Institute (compliance) in order to identify and manage the risks of violations of competition law and the possibility of preventing these violations by companies. The article presents the definition of compliance, describes the experience of foreign competition authorities in development, organization and implementation of compliance programs. Special attention is paid to the potential benefits that business receives as part of the successful implementation of the antimonopoly compliance system, including the possibility of mitigating circumstance in case a company commits an antimonopoly offense.

New Year's Address of the State Secretary — Deputy Head of the Federal Antimonopoly Service S.A. Puzyrevsky to Readers, Authors and Members of the Editorial Board of the Journal “Russian Competition Law and Economy”

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What Has Changed in European Concept of Undertaking? From „FENIN“ to „EASY PAY“

Competition is the main self-regulatory principle of the market in general, internal market included. Competition law has the form of general clauses making its application dependant on the correct interpretation of general concepts. Core competition rules of the Functional Treaty („TFEU“) are addressed to undertakings; undertaking thus belongs to key concepts of competition law. Interpretation of this concept is decisive for the scope of competition rules application. So, the article explores different approaches of the case law to the interpretation of the concept of undertaking based on economic activity. It compares the FENIN doctrine and the new functional test of separability developed in EASY PAY. It drives attention to the impact of this new test for the evaluation of procurement activities under competition scrutiny.

O DIREITO ANTITRUSTE BRASILEIRO E A REPRESSÃO À CONCORRÊNCIA ILÍCITA: FORMAÇÃO DE CARTÉIS E ACORDOS NA LEI 12.529/2011

The scope of this article is to study Competition Law and establish its conception in and for contemporaneity, based on which the Brazilian System for the Defense of Competition will be analyzed. Given its analytical and critical conception, the work is carried out according to the deductive method, without forgetting the use of the hermeneutic-dialectic approach. After analyzing some instruments considered adequate to repress cartelization, the study clarifies the nuances that permeate it from the perspective of the Competition Defense Law. Understood, in contemporary times, as an instrument for the implementation of public policies aimed at safeguarding free competition, the repression of the abuse of economic power and the pursuit of anti-competitive offenses, the Brazilian Antitrust Law structured a system of dual protection of competition - control of structures and conduct - and, by authorizing CADE to enter into agreements with infringing economic agents, it ensured the use of effective instruments for proving illegal practices, repression- punishment and prevention, especially with regard to cartels.

EU Competition Law Devours Its Children: The Proliferation of Anti-Competitive Object and the Problem of False Positives

In the last decade, EU competition law reached a major turning point in its history. Anti-competitive object became an elusive and unpredictable rule, which boosts the risk of false positives and has a significant chilling effect. This article analyses this metamorphosis and the social damages it is causing, and proposes an alternative conception. The article demonstrates that the emerging new concept of anti-competitive object erroneously conflates ‘contextual analysis’, which has been part of the object-inquiry from the outset, and ‘effects-analysis’, which has no role to play here. It submits that both doctrinal and policy reasons confirm that anti-competitive object should be a category-building principle of ‘judicial rule-making’ (‘definition of the definition’) and not applicable to individual arrangements directly.

Possible Legal Cooperation for a BRICS Perspective on International and Transnational Economic Law

This research paper seeks to identify and analyze the regulations that rule the economic life of the BRICS countries in the fields of foreign investment’s law, competition law and global administrative law, and further to identify points of convergence and divergence among them in order to indicate the possibilities of legal cooperation to facilitate economic exchanges and investments flow among them. We believe that the possible bottlenecks in trade and investment can be overcome mostly by exchange of experiences, to mitigate the lack of knowledge on national laws and regulations, and by the creation of cooperative mechanisms that facilitate the economic flow among them.

Distribution of new cars – no longer an issue for EU competition law?

Distribution cartels in the automotive sector used to be frequently dismantled and sanctioned by the European Commission and the EU Courts still some 15 years ago. In recent years, however, only a few cases have been reported at the national level of EU Member States. Is it because the distribution of new cars really ceased to be a competition problem as the European Commission declared when it removed this part of the automotive business from the specific Block Exemption Regulation for the automotive sector in 2010? The purpose of the present analysis is first to inspect the car distribution cases that emerged in the EU after the year 2000 and, second, to speculate somewhat whether new forms of distribution, brought by the digitalization of marketing and sales, cannot bring about also new risks to cartel agreements and other types of distortions of competition in car sales.