OREANDA-NEWS. June 23, 2014. The Head of FAS, Igor Artemiev; Stats-Secretary, Deputy Head of FAS, Andrey Tsarikovskiy; Deputy Head of FAS, Alexander Kinev; the Head of FAS Legal Department, Sergey Puzyrevskiy; the Head of FAS Anti-Cartel Department, Andrey Tenischev; and the Head of FAS Department for Control over Industry and Defence-and-Industrial Complex, Maxim Ovchinnikov participated in a meeting with the legal community on “Antimonopoly Regulation in Russia: Trends, Pressing Problems and the Methods to Resolve them” that took place in the course of the IV International Legal Forum in St Petersburg.

Maxim Ovchinnikov presented the Principles of economic analysis of pricing practices, devised by FAS to verify compliance with the Federal Law “On Protection of Competition”.

The Principles are aimed at determining common approaches to analyzing pricing policy of the dominant economic entities in order to verify compliance with the antimonopoly law as well as to improve the quality of economic analysis of pricing policies of dominant economic entities and expand the practice of applying “comparable markets method” in such analysis.

“In the Principles, we tried to determine the reasonable level of prices for the goods sold by dominant economic entities. The Principles provide for in-depth economic analysis of characteristics and specifics of market performance and define different methods of price analysis on export- , import-oriented and equilibrium markets”, pointed out Maxim Ovchinnikov.

Igor Artemiev emphasized: “This is a basic approach that a company can take into account to avoid claims filed by the antimonopoly authority. Every case, however, will be investigated separately”.

“It is not a framework but a “safe harbor” for big business, but if a company left it, it should be prepared to answer questions from FAS”, added Andrey Tsarikovskiy.

The legal community stressed the importance of FAS efforts towards improving economic analysis and clarifying such a complex issue as determining monopolistically high price.

Participants also discussed such issues of the practice of antimonopoly regulation as challenging warnings, reducing turnover fines below the lowest level; multiplicity of the same actions recognized as a violation within the same case and the Register of Unfair Suppliers.