HOW DOES FAS USE NEW DIGITAL TOOLS TO EXPOSE CARTELS?

Andrey Tenishevtook part in a meeting of the ICN (International Competition Network) Working Group on cartels

In 2018, Russia, along with Brazil and France were elected co-chairs of the ICN Cartel Working Group. The new leadership of the Working Group sees one of the major objectives of countering cartels in elaborating new methods to combat digital cartels. An ICN current projects concerns drafting a framework document on the impact of digitalization upon exposing and proving anticompetitive agreements.

President of CADE – Brazil’s competition authority – Alexandre Barreto de Souza emphasized: "We value a lot this opportunity to meet again in Brazil in order to discuss such important issues as exposing and suppressing cartels. They are some of the most serious problems preventing economic development; so joint discussions of the issue help us look at it from different points of view and find the most suitable and efficient solution.

It is a great honour for CADE to organize here the workshop of the ICN Cartel Working Group. I’d like to take this opportunity and thank our colleagues, particularly, the FAS delegation for participating in the event. We are immensely happy to have very solid relationship with FAS and hope that our collaboration will be expanding in all antimonopoly spheres, including countering cartels”.

Head of FAS Anti-Cartel Department Andrey Tenishev was a speaker at the Plenary session on “Cartel operations and a changing business environment” of the ICN Cartel Working Group.

He described how digitalization is changing economic relations and influencing the law. The listeners showed a vivid interest in FAS cases regarding unlawful economic coordination with use of algorithms: software designed for bid-rigging collusions and restricting entry to the markets.

Andrey Tenishev called upon competition authorities to employ the results of technological progress to search for and gather evidence to prove cartels. He outlined FAS experience in this area:

“Cartelization is the major challenge to the economy today. FAS is using all possibilities of the digital epoch for system-wide efforts against cartels, and the “Big Digital Cat” developed by FAS is aimed at  automated search of cartel agreements and compiling a set of evidence against cartels. Exchanging experiences with foreign colleagues showed that the way we have chosen is absolutely right”.

“In future we should think seriously that in the modern, rapidly changing world the cartel definition cannot remain a dogma and it is pretty possible that tomorrow a cartel formed to artificially shape consumer demand or illegally exchange big data will be as dangerous for the economy as price collusion and will require per se prohibition”, added Head of FAS Anti-Cartel Department.