Andrey Tenishev: “Cartels are the threat to the national economic security”

Cartels threaten Russian national economy and security and lead to social tension

Andrey Tenishev, Head of FAS Anti-Cartel Department, and Alevtina Timoshenko, an assistant to Head of FAS, took part in an annual strategic session of the Expert Analytical Centre at the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration.

In 2016, FAS exposed 678 anticompetitive agreements, of which 262 were concluded with the authorities.

330 cartels were exposed, including 300 bed-rigging cartels, which means that the number of bid-rigging collusions increased by 28.4% in comparison with 2015.

Certain qualitative changes in bid-rigging cartels are observed: such a cartel can exist for several years and comprise hundreds of public procurements.

“We expose numerous cartels in such important strategic sectors of the economy as public defence procurement, allocation and harvesting aquatic biological resources, supplying medical drugs and food products to the population. The scale of cartel operations is such that the society should understand the danger of such actions to be able to successfully suppress them. Cartel is a threat by itself: increasing prices or dividing the market restrict competition and ate harmful for the economy in general as well as for every particular consumer. Essentially, it does not matter for the injured how they were stripped of their money: a petty thief pickpockets a purse or colluded merchants raised prices unlawfully. The difference is only in the method of money-stripping, the result is the same”, pointed out Andrey Tenishev. “Moral restraint should become one of the restraining factors, along with administrative and criminal liability. In this point of view, discussing cartelization of the economy is important and necessary for us”.