FAS INTERNATIONAL EFFORTS ARE HIGHLY APPRAISED

Global competition community characterized positively FAS international activities for the past several years

On 6 June 2019, the Competition Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) held a discussion on “Global relations” where OECD and foreign competition authorizes presented the results of international efforts for the last year.

According to the Committee Chairman Frederic Jenny, lately international activities have been gaining momentum, and are now an essential area of the work of competition authorities and OECD in general. Robust participation of not only OECD members but also the competition authorities of BRICS economies, including FAS, and other countries in shaping the global competition agenda enables to put the most pressing and timely issues of competition development for discussion.

One of the key items on the agenda was a report about the work of OECD Regional Competition Centre in Budapest. Renato Ferrandi who is responsible for the Budapest Centre at OECD and representatives of Hungary’s Competition Authority pointed out that in the past year the Regional Centre had organized more than 10 events on the compelling issues of competition enforcement. Such events include combating cartels, merger consideration, improving competence of judges, developing young competition authorities, etc.

During the presentation about the activities of the regional Centre, it was pointed out that like in previous years, several events of the Centre in 2018-2019 were traditionally organized jointly with FAS in Russia. For example, the Round Tables on merger consideration (May 2019, Kazan), anti-cartel efforts (October 2018, St Petersburg) etc. The Regional Centre informed that these events “attracted a lot of experts and were very successful”. FAS staff have publications in the OECD Centre’s journal on regular basis.

The speakers gave statistics on foreign competition authorities participating in activities and events of the Regional Centre. According to their information, Russia has become a leader by the number of experts who took part in the Centre’s events.

Deputy Head of FAS Andrey Tsyganov summed up: “International, and particularly, regional collaboration is getting increasingly more important in the global economy, as well cooperation on the largest international platforms such as OECD. Collaborations with the aim of exchanging experience, information about the pressing issues of the antimonopoly enforcement allows to not only resolve some issues but also eliminate them completely”.