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Competition law

Competition law, known in the United States as antitrust law, has three main elements:

• Prohibiting agreements or practices that restrict free trading and competition between businesses.
• Banning abusive behavior by a firm dominating a market, or anti-competitive practices that tend to lead to such a dominant position. Practices controlled in this way may include predatory pricing, tying, refusal to deal, and many others.
• Supervising the mergers and acquisitions of large corporations, including some joint ventures.

Protecting the interests of consumers and ensuring that entrepreneurs have an opportunity to compete in the market economy are often treated as important objectives. Competition law is closely connected with law on deregulation of access to markets, state aids and subsidies, the privatization of state owned assets and the establishment of independent sector regulators. In recent decades, competition law has been viewed as a way to provide better public services. The history of competition law reaches back to the Roman Empire. Since the twentieth century, competition law has become global. The two largest and most influential systems of competition regulation are United States antitrust law and European Community competition law. National and regional competition authorities across the world have formed international support and enforcement networks.

Competition Law in Russia

The Law on the Protection of Competition came into effect in the Russian Federation on 26 October 2006. The stated aim for establishing of the law was to bring the Russian Federation to be in line with the general trend of competition regulation in Europe. Beyond western European competition laws against dominance, the Competition Law in Russia expressly presumes existence of dominance by defining limits.

1. A company is in dominance if it dominates more than 50% of market share.
2. A company with less than 35% of market share, unless in exceptional case, is not considered dominant.
3. A collective dominance exists when up to three companies hold a combined market share exceeding 50%.
4. A collective dominance exists when up to five companies hold a combined market share exceeding 75%.
5. A safe harbor margin of up to 20% market share per company for agreements between companies of different segments of a supply chain.

The law also places restrictions on aids from, and public procurement policies of federal, provincial or municipal governments that otherwise would encourage anti-competition.

The law is enforced by the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service (FAS). The law also gives the FAS authority over approval of company mergers stipulating various combinations of limits of assets of merging companies, an excess of which would require prior approval from the FAS. The scope of regulation of the FAS is focused on the commodity market and financial services with mandates over operations and transactions not just within the Russian Federation but also those taking place outside the boundaries of Russia which would have anti-competitive effects on the Russian market place.

In addition to a separate competition law, the Code of Administrative Offences has also been amended to increase liability of anti-competitive practices. Punitive measures against anti-competitive practices are limited out in terms of percentages of revenues of a company.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antitrust

Active Vocabulary

I. Find in the text English equivalents for the following Russian words and word combinations:

предотвращение, запрет (запрещение), свободная торговля, оскорбительное поведение, непомерно высокие цены, контролировать, приобретения, заключать сделку, политика в области закупок, снятие ограничений, государственные активы, доля рынка, ограничения, слияние компаний, вносить изменения\поправки, обязательство\ответственность, доход, карательные меры, сделка (транзакция).