The Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine: highlights of year 2017

During VII International Competition Policy Forum held in Kyiv on 15 March 2018, Yuriy Terentyev, the Chairman of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine (the “AMC“), presented the Annual Report of the AMC for 2017. Traditionally, it provides summary and statistics of the AMC’s activities for the past year, demonstrates examples of the most extraordinary cases handled by the AMC, highlights important trends and tendencies of competition policy and its enforcement in Ukraine. The most significant ones are outlined below.

• Last year, the AMC actively demonstrated its legislative initiatives, in particular, the AMC issued Typical requirements for vertical concerted practices of economic entities and Guidance on increase of efficiency of control over economic concentrations for undertakings subject to sanctions, as well as produced Draft guidance on assessment of non-horizontal mergers, which has already come into effect in March 2018, and Draft methodology of market definition, which is currently under public discussions and is subject to further revisions prior to its finalizing.
• The priority industry sectors for the AMC in 2017 were the pharmaceutical, fuel and energy, and telecommunications sectors, as well as transport and consumer goods areas.
• The AMC defined markets and spheres that will be in the focus for 2018, namely natural gas market, market of mobile communication services, light oil products market, market of bank services, railway transportation market, unfair business practices in the retail sphere, activities of seaports and airports, and others.
• Abuses of dominant (monopoly) position (795 cases) and anticompetitive practices of state bodies (610 cases) continued to be the most common violations of Ukrainian competition law during 2017.
• The highest fines for 2017 were imposed for anticompetitive concerted practices (including distortion of a public tender, entering into distribution agreements, which lead to limitation of the competition on the market). The AMC investigated 317 cases of anticompetitive concerted practices while the biggest combined fine for this type of violation reached approximately EUR 41 million in the fuel industry and EUR 4.1 million in the pharmaceutical area.
• 2017 demonstrated an increase in the number of merger filings submitted to the AMC for clearance of concentrations to 666 (against 547 in 2016), with the biggest share attributed to foreign applicants and companies with foreign investment (439 applications).
• The number of unfair business practices cases investigated by the AMC in 2017 totaled to 256. Approximately 81% of these violations (208 cases) were qualified as “gaining competitive advantages by disseminating inaccurate information”.
• In 2017, 22.7% of the AMC’s decisions (i.e. 239) were challenged in court, while only 3.1% of them were recognized by courts as invalid in whole or in part.

If you have any questions regarding this information please contact Vladimir Sayenko, Valentyna Hvozd, or Oleksandr Nagorny.