Andrey Tsarikovskiy reported to legislators on the results of inspecting retail chains
Regional FAS Offices conducted 701 inspections of retail chains at the federal, regional and municipal levels. Signs of violations are exposed in 69 provinces.
Stats-secretary, Deputy Head of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS Russia) Andrey Tsarikovskiy made a report for the Legislative Council of the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation on 24 April 2017 in St Petersburg.
“The Law on Trade and violations in this field concern everybody, each citizen feels their impact”, emphasized Andrey Tsarikovskiy. He thanked Deputy Chairperson of the State Duma, the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation, Irina Yarovaya, for a constructive dialogue on discussing the Law provisions and the situation in trade in general with the antimonopoly authority.
Deputy Head of the antimonopoly body pointed out: “FAS conducts robust inspections to verify observance of the antimonopoly rules and the Law on Trade in the entire Russia”. For instance, having analyzed 11,266 contracts across all retail chains, 1261 violations were exposed in supplier contracts, which is 11% of all checked contracts. “It means, practically every 9th contact was concluded with violations”, underlined Deputy Head of FAS.
The bulk of the exposed violations concern breaching the payment deadlines specified in the contracts (34%) and the obligation on exceeding the retail remuneration threshold (22%).
Andrey Tsarikovskiy informed about FAS efforts towards competition advocacy with regard to the Law on Trade and the fair competitor rules. He said that retail chains have done considerable error correction to eliminate bad practices.
Finally, he emphasized that FAS formed a Working Group on enforcement of the Law on Trade which has now overgrown to the Trade Expert Council.
To ensure more efficient interaction between market players, Andrey Tsarikovskiy proposed to create a discussion platform in the form of a Market Council, comprising representatives of suppliers, retail chains and regulators.
