Does part 4 of Article 11 of the Competition Protection Law contain prohibitions per se?

Egor Svechnikov, Lawyer at the Law Firm "YUST"

The so-called “third antitrust package” – changes to the Federal Law No. 135-FZ “On protection of competition) dated 26.08.2006 (hereinafter – Competition Protection Law) and to other laws of the Russian Federation – entered into force in January of 2012. Since that happened, the practice of application of the new competition law provisions undoubtedly requires explanation. Let us pay attention to Article 11 of the Law, which has suffered great changes (for example, the terms “cartel” and “control” were introduced into it for the first time, and prohibitions on coordinated actions were formed into the separate clause 11.1).

The FAS of Russia’s position is that the third antitrust package is aimed at the liberalization of the antitrust legislation. Sticking to this, the amendments to the Competition Protection Law changed Article 11 in the following way (among other ways): they shortened the list of unconditional prohibitions on agreements between economy subjects, the so-called “per se prohibitions”. Such prohibitions are special in the following way: they are actually imposed per se, independently from the market situation, limitation (elimination) of competition or other negative consequences for the participants of the market relations. The former edition of part 1 of Article 11 of the Competition Protection Law fixed nine per se prohibitions; the new one stipulates only five.

But has the number of the prohibitions really decreased? <…>

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