The fight against abuse of dominant market position, collusions and cartel agreements practices by the Antimonopoly Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan is carried out within the framework of the powers vested in accordance with the Law of the Republic of Uzbekistan “On Competition” and a number of other regulatory legal acts.
The Committee on an ongoing basis analyzes the activities of enterprises included in the Public Register of economic entities that hold a dominant position in the commodity or financial market with a view to their compliance with competition laws.
One of the features of the behavior of individual monopolistic enterprises is the inclusion of various discriminatory conditions in their agreements, which entails the infringement of the rights and interests of consumers and other business entities, as well as creation of obstacles to access to the product or financial market of other business entities.
These actions contradict the requirements of Article 10 of the Law of the Republic of Uzbekistan “On Competition” and are being qualified as abuse of a dominant position.
During 2019 the Committee examined more than 2,000 agreements of 132 enterprises included in the Public Register of economic entities that hold a dominant position in the commodity or financial market.
Based on the results of the study, facts of abuse were revealed in the agreements of 24 enterprises, in terms of the conditions associated with the responsibility of an economic entity to fulfill or default on obligations under the agreement, which stipulated more stringent financial and other liability conditions for counterparties than for monopolistic enterprises themselves.
For example, failure to fulfill or untimely fulfillment of terms of the contract, if the maximum size of the penalty for the counterparty was 50% of the contract amount, for “Bektemir-alcohol Experimental Zavod JSC” itself it was only 20%, and for the refusal to purchase products the size of the penalty was20 % for the counterparty, while, when the quality of the delivered products does not match it’s only 5%.
Similarly, in the contracts of “Andijon Biokimyo Zavodi JSC” and “Kukonspirt JSC”. Failure or untimely fulfillment of the terms of the contract, if the maximum penalty for the counterparty was 50% of the contract amount, then for Andijon Biokimyo Zavod JSC and Kukonspirt JSC there was no liability at all.
As a result, the Antimonopoly Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan issued relevant orders to these monopoly enterprises to eliminate violations of competition law.
Also, an order was issued for “UzAuto Motors JSC” to continue preventing violations of competition laws regarding restriction of competition and infringement of the rights of insurance companies when providing insurance services for passenger cars sold by installments to Uzavtosanoat JSC employees and its enterprises.
In addition, a content order was issued to the “Play Mobile” LLC provider to prevent future violations of competition law that operates on the telecom market and violates the requirements of part three of Article 11 of the Law of the Republic of Uzbekistan “On Competition”, which provides for a ban on the coordination of economic activities of economic entities if such coordination leads or may lead to limited competition.
As a result, all listed business entities eliminated competition law violations.