It’s been an action-packed year for the competition watchdog both in terms of the umber of cases handled, and the changes made in the current regulations to both strengthen the commission, and to create a conducive environment for businesses.
In March, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) notified two much-needed tools – commitment and settlement – to reduce litigation and ensure quicker market corrections. Around the same time, the CCI introduced leniency-plus facility which aims to further improve the cartel-detection mechanism.
Experts said that these tools and a bunch of other amendments to the competition laws in the past year will make the enforcement procedures more smooth. “Amendments to the general regulations, lesser penalty regulations, recovery of monetary penalty and combination regulations have taken place in the past one year. All these will provide certainty and clarity to the enforcers as well as all to the stakeholders,” said KK Sharma, noted competition lawyer.
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Even though CCI already had deal value thresholds (DVT) based on turnover and asset size, the regulator introduced a new DVT in September that requires mergers and acquisitions (M&As) exceeding a value of Rs 2,000 crore (and where the target entity has “substantial business operations in India”, to get regulatory clearance. This move was aimed to target M&As in the start-up space where there have been past instances of a Big Tech firm acquiring significant shareholding in a small startup which didn’t need CCI approval at that time. But over a period of time, the acquisition became big enough to impact the market.
In fact, in a recent event, CCI chairperson Ravneet Kaur said that the regulator is now closely looking into deals in the digital market to identify “killer” and “creeping” acquisitions. Though some experts have a word of caution for the regulator. Vinod Dhall, former chairperson of CCI said that CCI needs to understand the digital markets better. “CCI should not get carried away by he moves in many other jurisdictions to discipline the Big Tech firms. It must take a balanced approach without losing the sight of consumer interest,
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