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Demet Kaya, Jun 13, 2009
The Act on the Protection of Competition (henceforth Turkish Competition Act) was approved in December 1994 and has been implemented by Turkish Competition Authority (TCA) since its establishment in 1997. As mentioned below, the purpose of this Act is to prohibit agreements, decisions, and practices preventing, distorting, or restricting competition in the markets for goods and services, and the abuse of dominance by the dominant undertakings in the market. The scope of this Act also includes any kind of legal transactions and behaviors having the nature of mergers and acquisitions (henceforth “mergers”) which shall create or strengthen a dominant position and meanwhile decrease competition to a significant extent. Prohibited activities under Turkish competition law such as anticompetitive agreements, abuses of dominant position, and anticompetitive mergers are included in Articles 4, 5, and 6 respectively. They have been written as general norms which describe anticompetitive and thus prohibited activities on a non-exhaustive basis. The Act has been amended several times. These amendments have been usually devoted to procedural articles which regulate the implementation of the articles describing the anticompetitive conducts and operations. However, the draft statute of the Competition Act which has been on the agenda of the Grand National Assembly of Turkey for a while, proposes several significant amendments to the present law. In this sense, it can be easily put forward that one of the outstanding changes in merger control regime proposed by this draft law could realize regulating conditional approval on commitment and other relevant remedies on a primary legislation level.
