OREANDA-NEWS. June 30, 2014. Deputy Head of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS Russia), Andrey Tsyganov, took part in the plenary session of the annual Moscow Forum of Business Partnerships – “Russia – Europe: Cooperation without Frontiers”.

The event focused on the status of Russian business in the current political situation and opportunities for entrepreneurship in Russia.

“Healthy economy is the economy based on competition”, stated Andrey Tsyganov. “Unfortunately, in our realities competition has not yet become the standard for entrepreneurs. FAS constantly initiates hundreds of cases against large monopolists as well as the authorities and local self-government bodies. People often face unreasonable growth of tariffs, prevention of entry to a particular market, and arbitrariness of officials. Clearly, the situation must be changed”.

Andrey Tsyganov emphasized that in the past ten years the Government’s attention to developing competition increased immensely. “In our opinion, the adopted measures, particularly, the Road Map for Developing Competition and Improving the Antimonopoly Law, constitute an important step towards fair competition”.

Next, Andrey Tsyganov discussed bad practices of doping business that some large international corporations tend to transfer to Russia. It is observed in machine-building, pharmaceuticals, food products, etc. “We see our objective in informing the foreign companies operating in Russia about the basic principles of the antimonopoly law. To this purpose, for example, FAS jointly with the European Business Association devised the Code of Correct Practices for Doing Business in the Automobile Industry. Earlier we used to receive enormous number of complaints about arbitrariness of the conduct large companies. Now the problem is resolved and we intend to extrapolate this experience to other market segments”.

“Overall, in spite of the cool-down displayed by the European Union in economics and politics, the life of Russian business continues moving forward: mergers and acquisitions are concluded, assets in various sectors of the economy are acquired”, summed up Andrey Tsyganov.