OREANDA-NEWS.  March 18, 2014. The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS Russia) found that “Sintez” Ltd., “IT-DISTRIBUTSIA” Ltd. and “Sistema” Ltd. violated Clause 2 Part 1 Article 11 of the Federal Law “On Protection of Competition”.

The companies violated the antimonopoly law by concluding an oral anticompetitive agreement to make one of the agreement participants the winner of an open auction for the right to conclude a contract for “Providing Services for Maintaining Software for Data Computing System of the Office of the Federal Treasury in the Nizhniy Novgorod region”.

FAS established that at the auction the company applied a scheme tentatively called “ram attack” by public procurement agents.

In particular, “Sistema” Ltd. concluded a contract at a price considerably exceeding the latest price offers made by “Sintez” Ltd. and “IT-DISTRIBUTSIA” Ltd.

Deputy Head of FAS Russia, Alexei Dotsenko, pointed out: “The auction started at the price over 1,4 million RUB; then within the first 18 seconds “Sintez” Ltd. and “IT-DISTRIBUTSIA” Ltd. took turns reducing the lot price and decreased it to 180,000 RUB - by 87% of the initial maximum price.

At the final stage of filing corrective price offers, at the last seconds of the auction “Sistema” Ltd. filed a price bid insignificantly lower that the latest corrective price offer filed by other auction bidders”.

“Ram attack” - two companies push down the price to dumping price, bona fide participants lose interest to bidding, at the latest seconds of the lot bidding the third cartel participant files a bid insignificantly lower than the prices of bona fide participants; then the two winners refuse to conclude the contract or they are removed for errors or a failure to meet the documentation requirements, and the third company is awarded a contract at a high price insignificantly different from the initial maximum price.