ANDREY TSARIKOVSKY: "CONTROL BODIES ARE REFEREES RATHER THAN FIGHTERS"

Stats-Secretary, Deputy Head of FAS described their role in the market economy and outlined pressing issues of competition policy at the Plenary session of the Conference on "Competition: markets, figures, people"

Andrey Tsarikovsky correlated policy papers on economic development in Russia: the National Competition Development Plan and the National Projects: “The projects cannot be implemented efficiently without an advanced competition network”.

In his opinion, the funds allocated for the National Projects sometimes are not spent, and sometimes their spending is not transparent.

“It is necessary to work, closely tying the National Plan and the National Projects. Robust efforts are now being undertaken in this field: Road Maps for developing sectors of Russian economy are adopted, and persons responsible for implementing the National Plan have visited all regions of Russia to fix-up any issues associated with fulfillment of the Plan”, emphasized Andrey Tsarikovsky.

Regarding the law-making plans, Deputy Head of FAS informed about the need to move away from “partitioning the market”: “We must go further – to define market power”.

Discussing public procurement and participation of small business in it, he emphasized that “government customers spend taxpayers’ rather than personal, own money so they do not have the right not to execute procurement. As for business reputation of businesses, unfortunately under the modern conditions this tool does not suffice so far as a criterion for participating in procurement. We can’t avoid injunctive remedies”.

Answering a question regarding state unitary enterprises and state-run companies and their competition with small business, Andrey Tsarikovsky concluded: “Giving procurement to state and municipal enterprises, we will win in operational decisions but lose strategically”.