OREANDA-NEWS. October 14, 2014. 70% of the respondents named “expanding the FAS outer contour” one of the major events in 2014.

Representatives of the Federal Antimonopoly Service, lawyers and business community took part in the VI Annual Conference on Antimonopoly Regulation in Russia organized by the “Vedomosti” newspaper.

At the beginning of the first session, Deputy Head of FAS, Andrey Tsyganov, reported the surely results on the major events in antimonopoly regulation that considerably influenced competition.

Majority of the respondents voted for expanding the outer FAS contour which means intensifying a public discussion on reforming the antimonopoly law.

According to Andrey Tsyganov, the choice is justified:

“In the past two years the forth antimonopoly package of amendments, FAS Reports on the state of competition and the Road Map on “Developing Competition and Improving the Antimonopoly Policy” adopted in 2012 have been actively discussed at all possible platforms.

Creating the Eurasian Economic Union is on the second position (at the moment it comprises Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan). The institution of criminal liability is on the third place. It was introduced in 1996 but for the first time has been used only this year.

Andrey Tenischev, the Head of FAS Anti-Cartel Department, continued discussing the issues of anticompetitive agreements.

“In several years FAS has been able to build up an anti-cartel system – devise the law, implement special investigation tools, establish enforcement practice. The achieved results are comparable with in the countries where the antimonopoly law is in place for dozens and even hundreds of years”.

Thanks to such efforts in 2014 FAS, together with the competition authorities of Australia and Brazil are elected co-chairs of the 2nd Sub-Group of the Cartel Working Group of the International Competition Network (ICN).

Practical cooperation between the antimonopoly authorities in such field is very important. For instance, cooperation with Norway’s competition authority helped FAS suppress a cartel in supplies of Norwegian fish to Russia.

“Today fish is supplied from Faroe Islands. We are already establishing relations with the local competition authority”, said Andrey Tenischev.

In spite of multi-year joint efforts, the issues of inter-state cooperation in cartel investigation are not regulated, especially in information exchange. It can be solved by adopting an international anti-cartel convention.

The Chairman of RF Government instructed all interested agencies to work on the idea of devising the convention.