Compliance remains a voluntary measure designed to minimize corporate risks

Antimonopoly staff and experts discussed compliance background and the main issues of its implementation

At the VIII Annual Conference on “Antimonopoly Regulation in Russia”, Deputy Head of FAS Andrey Tsyganov stated: “We must not be limited by putting into effect a draft law in introducing compliance, we should explain to people how and what should be done and devise the necessary recommendations”.

At the Conference experts discussed an idea of devising recommendations by the regulator for economic entities on undertaking adequate measures on antimonopoly compliance and mechanisms for evaluating efficiency of such measures. In this context the already existing, similar mechanisms can be adopted or assimilated, for instance, anti-corruption measures. In Russia it is now possible to carry out free and anonymous self-assessment of quality and efficiency of anticorruption measures adopted by companies, via the portal of Russian Compliance Alliance – a non-profit on-line self-evaluation system of business ethics by companies, developed with the help of Russian compliance experts (http://compliancealliance.ru/). The system developers already confirmed their readiness to adopt and expand it for similar applications to evaluate antimonopoly compliance measures.

A business representative Marina Navolokova, Division Head, at the Corporate Law Department, MTS, discussed their corporate compliance practices: “It took us three years to fully launch the system. The positive aspects of implementing it are escaping fragmentation and moving to uniformity of decision-making and enhancing awareness of MTS staff on the norms of the antimonopoly law”.

In the past year the number of companies that published their corporate compliance rules increased by orders, and the lack of legislatively formalized norms, specifying the minimum requirements to the compliance documents, is becoming increasingly more evident.

Deputy Head of FAS Sergey Puzyrevskiy emphasized that the time for implementing compliance had arrived when administrative liability for violating the antimonopoly law came into force and turnover fines were adopted. According to the Head of FAS, it constitutes serious corporate risks.

The main focus of the discussions was on the voluntary principle of implementing compliance procedures. Earlier, FAS proposed to introduce mandatory in-house rules for preventing violations of the antimonopoly law for particular categories of economic entities, primarily state-run companies.

According to Andrey Tsyganov, the voluntary principle presumes free determination of a company’s owner on implementing compliance, based on evaluating the risks of violating the law on competition.

“In our view, the state as an owner should make a decision on mandatory compliance since administrative liability in the form of fines in this context means direct losses of budgetary funds, which can be avoided through preventative measures”, summed up Deputy Head of FAS.