OREANDA-NEWS. Administrative intervention in relations between market participants will be reduced considerably. All changes to the antimonopoly law, devised by the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS Russia), are designed to achieve this, stated the Head of FAS Igor Artemiev at the V Annual Conference on “Antimonopoly Regulation in Russia”.

Igor Artemiev outlined quite a few important objectives that FAS intends to achieve. He gave a detail account of a concept of antimonopoly enforcement and clarified FAS position on the amendments to the Federal Law “On Protection of Competition”.

The amendments consist of two parts: first, those changes that were not included in the “third antimonopoly package” and that required additional discussions with the authorities and the business. Second, proposals put forward by the business community.

In particular, post-merger (affecting the state of competition) notifications will be completely abolished. To eliminate state intervention in the economy the authorities shall have to seek FAS approval to form state and municipal unitary enterprises.

“We shall not consent to state and municipal unitary enterprises on competitive markets”, emphasized Igor Artemiev.

Taking about the qualitative indicators of FAS work, Igor Artemiev pointed out at the general trend for reducing the number of opened cases against the increased number of warnings and admonitions.

In 2012 the number of initiated cases reduced by 12.4%, in 2013 - by 27.7%. With expanding the institution of warnings the number of cases should go down by 200-300%.

“The institutions of warnings and admonitions showed good results. Therefore, a decision is made to expand them to other forms of abusing market dominance - anticompetitive actions by the authorities, as well as unfair competition, except intellectual property”, explained Igor Artemiev.

“At the moment the amendments to the antimonopoly law are being approved by the interested federal bodies and representatives of the business community”, concluded the Head of FAS.