OREANDA-NEWS. November 18, 2013. The Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS Russia) initiated a case against “Sintez” Ltd., “OT DISTRIBUTION” Ltd. and “Sistema” Ltd. upon signs of concluding an anticompetitive agreement taking part in an open auction (in breach of Clause 2 Part 1 Article 11 of the Federal Law “On Protection of Competition”).

FAS suspects signs of violating the antimonopoly law by “Sintez” Ltd., “IT DISTRIBUTION” Ltd. and “Sistema” Ltd. implementing an oral anticompetitive agreement to make one of them the winner of the open auction for the right to conclude a contract for “Rendering Services for Software Maintenance of the Information-Computer Complex of the Office of the Federal Treasury in the Nizhny Novgorod Region”.

According to FAS, in the course of the auction the companies applied the scheme that among public procurement participants is conventionally called “Ramming”.

Clause 2 Part 1 Article 11 of the Federal Law “On Protection of Competition” recognizes as cartels and prohibits agreements between competitors – economic entities that sell goods on the same market, if such agreements lead or can lead to increasing, decreasing or maintaining competition.

“Ramming”: two companies engage in predatory pricing, bona fide participants lose interests to competitive bidding, in the dying seconds of the bidding the third cartel files a bid insignificantly lower than a price of a bona fide participant, next the two winners refuse to conclude a contract or they are excluded due to errors or to not meeting the requirements specified in the documentation, and the contract is awarded at a high price, which is insignificantly different from the original maximum price of the third company.