FAS AND ASSOCIATION OF ANTIMONOPOLY EXPERTS SIGNED AN AGREEMENT

It concerns in-house appeal, cases on violations of the antimonopoly law, the tariff law, etc.

On 24 May 2019, FAS and the Association of Antimonopoly Experts signed an Agreement regulating the work on obtaining independent expert opinions by the members of the Association on the issues under FAS competence.

Signing the Agreement, Head of FAS Igor Artemiev emphasized:

“The Agreement details the specifics of our collaboration. It emphasizes FAS respect to the work of the Association of Antimonopoly Experts”.

Another, equally important event was formation of the Working Group on International Affairs by the Association upon a FAS initiative.

“Recently FAS has pursued a new and robust information policy. For example, for the past three years FAS is already a triple winner of a competition advocacy contest organized by the International Competition Network (ICN) and the World Bank.  More than 20 papers of FAS staff on the current enforcement issues were published in international journals. At the last ICN Steering Committee FAS was elected a co-chair of the Cartel Working Group, which emphasizes FAS achievements in countering anticompetitive agreements. We see the need to expand publications of representatives of the legal community in various international journals. This objective should be reached together with the Antimonopoly Experts Association within the frame of the newly formed Working Group”, pointed outLesya Davydova, Head of FAS Department for International Economic Cooperation.

In her opinion, efforts of Working Group will help elaborate coherent approaches and positions of the Association to be presented internationally.

The next item on the agenda was a draft federal law on “On the fundamental principles of government regulation of tariff (prices)”. Head of FAS Department for Regional Tariff Regulation Yulia Yudina described the current status of the draft law.

“The document is submitted to the Government of the Russian Federation. One of the most important moments in the draft law is long-term tariffs. Today consumers and regulated entities do not always understand how tariffs are formed and will look for the next period. The draft also gives the deadline to tariff verification while the verification procedure will be outlined in special Regulations and bylaws”, informed Yulia Yudina.

“The draft law will be the basis of tariff regulation, when benchmarking will become the priority but not the only method. This year, bylaws to the draft law also will be prepared”, added Deputy Head of FAS Sergey Puzyrevskiy.

Regulation of the operations of procurement unions in the antimonopoly law was discussed afresh and the Association’s proposals were drafted. Summing up the discussion, Head of FAS Igor Artemiev made a decision on regulating operation of procurement unions.

Head of FAS Legal Department Artem Molchanov presented a Report on antimonopoly compliance, drafted by the Antimonopoly Service. He summarized the results of the work in this area.

“FAS is the first body adopted antimonopoly compliance. Nearly all federal authorities responsible for implementing the Road Map on competition development have presented and coordinated with FAS their in-house regulations on antimonopoly compliance”, stressed Artem Molchanov.

FAS continues the efforts on exposing the risks and decreasing them in draft legal documents that can contradict the law. A Working Group analyses any issues in the current documentation on a quarterly basis.

“Courts are another mechanism for evaluating our work. Last year, legitimacy of 89% FAS acts was confirmed by Courts. A trend is noted on increasing this figure”, informed Artem Molchanov.

Other items on the agenda included drafting several explanations and reviews of FAS Presidium’s practice in various pressing issues.

The next meeting of FAS and the Association of Antimonopoly Experts will be in June 2019.