Sergey Puzyrevskiy: FAS efforts to explain the antimonopoly law help reduce antimonopoly violations

Deputy Head of FAS Sergey Puzyrevskiy highlighted the issues of good supplies and sales and the related problems at the Round Table from the “Dialogue with the Authorities” series – “FAS and members of Russian Corporate Counsel Association. Continuing the conversation” on 20 October 2017.

“We participate in the reform of FAS control-and-supervisory activities. Our main objective is to ensure correct and useful mechanisms of cooperation with business. Rather than punitive bodies, regulators should act, first of all, as agencies assisting business in organizing their work correctly”, emphasized Sergey Puzyrevskiy.

Public discussions are one of such support tools carried out on a regular basis. They attract increasingly more attention of businessmen who are able to discuss what is possible and what cannot be done, using particular examples, and also learn about FAS enforcement practice.

“Our system of antimonopoly regulation is built up on the principle that businesses are free in their activity. We believe that under competitive conditions restrictions should be reduced to the minimum, the more competition is on the market, the less antimonopoly regulation there should be. Only the norms protecting against unfair competition apply to such markets. Any intervention of the authorities to the competitive market can have adverse consequences for competition”, said Sergey Puzyrevskiy.

In his opinion, regulators start imposing restrictions after exceeding the 20% market share. The most widespread violations of the antimonopoly law in this field are fixing resale price and prohibiting sale of competitors’ goods.

Controversial issues for many companies include risks of discrimination, restrictions in agreements on dealer territorial limits, exclusive conditions on the side of distributors as well as the side of sellers, or sales policies.

Deputy Head of FAS outlined the FAS position regarding investigations of such violations and gave recommendations for business how to avoid such mistakes.

President of Russian Corporate Counsel Association, Alexandra Nesterenko pointed out that “the discussions at the Round Table were useful for both consumables segment and the segment of industrial goods and raw materials. In spite of the constant importance of the theme, FAS explanations and legal positions need clarification and updating, which Sergey Puzyrevskiy has just done. We have also touched the issues of goods sales in the work of the Eurasian Economic Commission, whose practice and approaches are in the process of shaping”.