Antitrust Advisory supported the annual Antimonopoly Forum of the Russian Corporate Counsel Association ‘Antitrust in a Rapidly Changing World: Modern Challenges and New Opportunities’
13.03.2020
On 13 March 2020, Antitrust Advisory supported the annual Antimonopoly Forum of the Russian Corporate Counsel Association (RCCA) ‘Antitrust in a Rapidly Changing World: Modern Challenges and New Opportunities’.
The Firm’s specialists actively participated in the Forum. Partner Alexander Egorushkin presented the results of the RCCA working group on the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) guidelines on price coordination. The issue of anticompetitive price coordination in the retail sector has been repeatedly raised in the FAS’s enforcement practice, and the prohibition in price coordination in practice still raises numerous questions. As such, RCCA created a working group tasked with systemising practices of retail price coordination and developing an approach to uncertain issues. The working group has prepared a draft document summarising the principle approaches to dealing with such cases. These include distinguishing between price coordination and anticompetitive agreements on price fixing, different elements of price coordination, etc.
Partner Evgeny Khokhlov acted as moderator for the session entitiled ‘Assessing Market Concentration Transactions: Increase in Market Concentration vs Positive Effect of the Transaction‘. He noted, amongst other things, that there is currently insufficient attention being paid to assessing the effects of M&A transactions in Russia. Statistical data on the number of transactions submitted for approval in Russia in recent years clearly demonstrates the need for the creation of an additional set of rules for the analysis of such transactions.
Antitrust Advisory’s economist Anastasiya Shastitko also spoke on the topic of ‘Assessing the Effects of Market Concentration Transactions’. As part of her presentation, she demonstrated a systematic approach to assessing both the positive and negative effects of M&A transactions, and to comparing them. She proposed practical instruments for antitrust policy in this area, and considered the specific characteristics of the differentiated products and digital markets, respectively. Effects on adjacent markets, as well as the coordination effects of a transaction should be taken into account in addition to the effects caused in the market where participants of such a transaction interact, she stated. Meanwhile, the interests of companies in a transaction can be driven not only, nor not even predominantly, by a desire to increase their market power, but rather by a goal of raising efficiency. Ignoring this fact could lead to the wrongful application of the law, Ms Shastitko maintained. Anastasia proposed using the goals of the Russian national projects, which set out development trajectories for the Russian economy for the coming years, to establish priorities when comparing positive and negative effects of M&A transactions.
For more information (in Russian) please click HERE
