ANDREY TSARIKOVSKIY: MAIN PRINCIPLES OF ANTI-CARTEL DRAFT LAW

Discussing legislative initiatives with legal and business communities, Deputy Head of FAS said that the main ones include the ''fifth antimonopoly package'' and an anti-cartel draft law, which is a “trade-off” between business and the law enforcers  

On 28 June 2019, Stats-secretary, Deputy Head of FAS Andrey Tsarikovskiy took part in a Round Table of the “Dialogue with the Authorities” series, organized by the Corporate Counsel Association:  “Freedom of entrepreneurship and freedom of competition”.

President of the Corporate Counsel Association, Alexandra Nesterenko pointed out: “It is remarkable that the Corporate Counsel Association organized the event immediately after the Chairman of the Government of the Russian Federation had announced 2019-2023 inter-departmental Programme for exposing and suppressing cartels and other competition-restricting agreements. The same as the Government meeting, the Round Table was opened by giving the news by Andrey Tsarikovskiy who stated that the Programme had been discussed with business and is designed to reinforce result-oriented cooperation with the law enforcement bodies to combat cartels. The Corporate Counsel Association supports the approaches of the Federal Antimonopoly Service based on rule of reason and justice”.

Lawyers, businessmen and Deputy Head of FAS held a dialogue to discuss the new vectors in antimonopoly law development, including the inter-departmental Anti-cartel Programme.

Andrey Tsarikovskiy said: “The Programme is prepared very thoroughly: everything must be taken into account to enable collaboration between a lot of bodies”.

“Cartel is the major antimonopoly offence, it kills the entire competition in principle”, continued Deputy Head of FAS. “This is our unique heritage of the post-Soviet economy, which effectively is a single large cartel”.

He drew attention to the moral aspect of the problem: cartels have never been considered and now are not considered an adverse phenomenon.

“A big inter-department programme under such input data is a must”, added Andrey Tsarikovskiy.

In his opinion, apart from prompt collaboration, the inter-departmental Programme includes staff training and PR work.

“We must move away from insignificant cartel cases, but it does not mean that small business can form cartels”, declared Andrey Tsarikovskiy, talking about the need to decrease the number of cases with damages up to 10 million RUB by 30%. “Estimating significance, we will consider the scale of a violation and its social danger”.

Experts also discussed “independence” of dealers and economic coordination cases.

In view of Andrey Tsarikovskiy, coordination is possible when “a person can dictate the conditions of economic operations, failure to execute which is punished. To confirm coordination, there should be a point from which instructions are given and absence of a possibility not to execute them”.

Other important items on the agenda included pricing practices, FAS powers to issue warnings and admonitions’, and the work of the antimonopoly body ion digital markets.