OREANDA-NEWS. December 18, 2013. Deputy Head of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS Russia) Andrey Tsyganov discussed the issue at the Forum on “Mergers and Acquisitions in Russia-2013”.

In the past 20 years, as reported Andrey Tsyganov, Russia has formed an efficient system of antimonopoly control over economic concentration comparable with the best world practices. “In the Road Map for “Developing Competition and Improving the Antimonopoly Regulation”, for instance, only one clause concerns this field of antimonopoly regulation.

The Recommendations of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which recognized that in general the law of the Russian Federation complies with its standards and principles, also draw attention to only one point: the need to improve the quality of economic analysis for considering mergers and acquisitions. It means that this field does not need considerable modification”, added Deputy Head of FAS.

Statistics confirms that year by year the system of control over economic concentration has been liberalized. In 2008 FAS considered nearly 6000 pre-merger petitions of economic entities planning transactions. In 2012 the figure was already 2500 – a decrease by 2.4 times. The number of post-merger notifications within the same period reduced went down by 22 times (from 44,000 to 1900). Such a considerable decrease of the number of filed notifications and petitions enabled FAS to concentrate on analyzing the most important transactions, completing which can result in adverse consequences for competition.

Now, as stated Andrey Tsyganov, FAS proposes to fully abolish post-factum control in the draft Law introduced to the State Duma. Andrey Tsyganov pointed out FAS authorizes 5-7% mergers and acquisitions in Russia with issuing determinations to exercise certain actions aimed at supporting competition. There are also cases when to complete a transaction an economic entity must sell some of its assets in the Russian Federation. FAS makes decisions to not allow a transaction if incomplete information was provided or competition is threatened. However, refusals constitute no more than 1% of the total number of considered petitions.

Deputy Head of FAS also informed Forum participants about additional amendments to the federal law aimed at creating a unified and clear mechanism of control over foreign investments (for more detail see http://www.fas.gov.ru/fas-news/fas-news_35075.html).