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OLIGARCHS DO NOT AVOID GIVING INFORMATION TO STATE COMMISSION ON ECONOMIC COMPETITION PROTECTION
YEREVAN, JUNE 3, NOYAN TAPAN. Deputy Chairman of the RA State Commision
on Economic Competition Protection Pavel Ghaltakhchian said at the June
2 conference "The Competition in Armenia. Expert Discussion" that one
of the main problems the Commission encounters is that the RA Law on
Economic Competition is not applied to the full. According to him, at
present this law is "a bit Western", but it is possible to bring the
law into line with the national peculiarities by making amendments
in it. Deputy Chairman of the Commission noted that collecting
imformation about the actual volumes of markets continues to be a
difficult task for the Commission. According to him, small economic
entities are reluctant to provide information about certain types of
goods, whereas oligarchs do not create problems in this regard. Despite
this, P. Ghaltakhchian opposed the idea of introducing the practice
of "early morning checks" suggested by international experts, since
in Armenia there are corruption-related risks involved in this form
of gathering information which is quite widespread in European
countries. At the same time it was mentioned that the Commission
has no other mechanism of collecting evidence about anticompetition
agreements reached between economic entities. In connection with
the only case of this type - the fact of increasing microbus fares,
the Commission filed a lawsuit last year and lost it.
YEREVAN, JUNE 3, NOYAN TAPAN. Deputy Chairman of the RA State Commision
on Economic Competition Protection Pavel Ghaltakhchian said at the June
2 conference "The Competition in Armenia. Expert Discussion" that one
of the main problems the Commission encounters is that the RA Law on
Economic Competition is not applied to the full. According to him, at
present this law is "a bit Western", but it is possible to bring the
law into line with the national peculiarities by making amendments
in it. Deputy Chairman of the Commission noted that collecting
imformation about the actual volumes of markets continues to be a
difficult task for the Commission. According to him, small economic
entities are reluctant to provide information about certain types of
goods, whereas oligarchs do not create problems in this regard. Despite
this, P. Ghaltakhchian opposed the idea of introducing the practice
of "early morning checks" suggested by international experts, since
in Armenia there are corruption-related risks involved in this form
of gathering information which is quite widespread in European
countries. At the same time it was mentioned that the Commission
has no other mechanism of collecting evidence about anticompetition
agreements reached between economic entities. In connection with
the only case of this type - the fact of increasing microbus fares,
the Commission filed a lawsuit last year and lost it.