BRICS Antitrust Coordination Committee meeting marks new stage of cooperation between member states

The BRICS Antitrust Coordination Committee meeting, held under the auspices of the Russian chairmanship, took place on July 2, 2024 in Geneva. The event brought together the heads of BRICS competition authorities, including Brazil, India, China, Russia, South Africa, as well as new members Iran, Ethiopia, Egypt, and the UAE.

The event highlighted the commitment of BRICS member states to promoting a competitive environment that benefits both businesses and consumers. The Russian side put forward a proposal to launch an expanded platform of cooperation to institutionalize and thus further deepen the BRICS partnership towards an inclusive, diverse and equitable economic order – BRICS Global Action Platform for Fair Market Competition developed by the BRICS Competition Law and Policy Centre. Representatives of antitrust agencies participating in the event expressed their support for initiating the next stage of institutionalization of antitrust cooperation. BRICS Centre will provide intellectual resources to facilitate the launch of the Action Platform.

In addition, the meeting focused on BRICS enlargement and the procedure for accession of new member countries to the Memorandum of Understanding on Cooperation in the Field of Competition Law and Policy of the BRICS countries signed on May 19, 2016 in St. Petersburg. During the meeting, participants also shared the main results of the activities of the BRICS competition authorities, highlighting the progress in promoting fair competition practices and resolving antitrust issues. Finally, participants adopted the Joint Statement of the Heads of BRICS Competition Authorities on Consolidating Efforts to Maintain Healthy Competition in Markets of Social Importance.

“During the Russian presidency, taking into account the expansion of BRICS, a window of opportunity is opening up, allowing to take antitrust cooperation in the BRICS format to a new qualitative level. In the future, this will include joint investigations into the activities of international cartels, global monopolies and economic concentration transactions. The need for this is recognized by both the expert community of our countries and antitrust regulators, as shown by the results of an in-depth study conducted by the BRICS International Center for Competition Law and Policy last year,” said Alexey Ivanov, Director of the BRICS Competition Law and Policy Center.

The primary function of the proposed Platform for Action is to assist competition authorities in their enforcement activities by providing the necessary technical and analytical assistance, and to support the development and expansion of expertise and research on competition policy among Member States. The ambition is to create a centre of expertise focused on BRICS, with the aim of creating and sharing knowledge in the global marketplace of ideas, currently dominated by traditional Western institutions.

“This platform, if implemented, will allow BRICS antitrust regulators to more actively influence the global architecture of economic relations. It is a mechanism for harmonizing positions on joint influence on the global economy, global markets and global value chains. BRICS governments have already supported the idea of ​​establishing a grain exchange, and this initiative is also an element of integration and facilitation of agreements in other sectoral areas. Supervision of industries organized into global value chains requires an approach embedded in a three-dimensional perspective of the value chain, as opposed to narrow, geographically limited markets. Flexible formats of joint cooperation covering jurisdictions in different segments of the value chain can provide a balanced response, thus creating a value chain of regulators,” Ivanov concluded.

Distributed by APO Group on behalf of the BRICS Competition Law and Policy Centre.