OREANDA-NEWS. By the order of the Russian Government, FAS Russia will check several markets of food products where prices are growing, reported the press-centre of FAS Russia.

FAS Russia revealed violations of the federal trade legislation in several Russian provinces, where manufacturers and trading companies used their monopolistic position to redistribute financial resources spent by the population on buying food products.

The Head of FAS Russia, Irog Artemyev, stated that "prices have gone up due to objective reasons; however, we revealed the situations when the companies "held back" the products, creating artificial deficit and waiting for their prices to be changed. Antimonopoly investigations of violations of the antimonopoly legislation have been already initiated in nine provinces".

As noted earlier by a State-secretary - Deputy Head of FAS Russia, Andrei Tsarikovsky: "the problem spins up throughout the whole Russia, and sometimes trading networks struggle to attract customers using unlawful methods".

In the near future FAS Russia will hold a meeting with representatives of big suppliers of food products to discuss the possible measures to normalize the situation.

The Head of FAS Russia said that due to increasing prices, FAS Russia will propose reducing customs duties from 15% to 5% on some imported food products.

Currently FAS Russia has developed some amendments to the Trade Act, changing the market dominance threshold for trading organizations from 35% to 15%. Also it will introduce special collective dominance thresholds.

In addition, the amendments to the Trade Act, devised by FAS Russia and the Ministry of Economic Development with participation of the Ministry of Agriculture, will soon be forwarded to the agencies concerned for their approval.