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Overview on Antitrust Law Compliance

Competition authorities impose considerable fines on cartels, i.e., firms agreeing to fix prices, rig bids, or to allocate customers or regions. For example, the European Commission regularly sets fines in the range of several hundred million Euros (see the EU cartel statistics). Firms engage in attempts to manage this business risk by the introduction of antitrust compliance programs, which shall ensure that the firms' employees abide to antitrust laws such as Section 1 Sherman Act in USA or Article 101 TFEU in Europe. The European Commission defines:

Compliance means respecting the law. In the competition field, it means business proactively respecting competition rules.

It appears important to create and strengthen the research-based groundwork of antitrust law compliance programs. This will help to foster the acceptance of such programs by competition authorities who may still be somewhat hesitant when it comes to recognizing the value of such programs. For example, the European Commission does not consider antitrust law compliance programs when setting fines:

The Commission welcomes and supports all compliance efforts by companies [...]. For the purpose of setting the level of fines [...] the mere existence of a compliance programme will not be considered as an attenuating circumstance.