Regional Competition Center for Latin America presents Guidelines on exchanges of information among competitors

Regional Competition Center for Latin America presents Guidelines on exchanges of information among competitors – by Rosa Abrantes-Metz

One of the main objectives of the Regional Competition Center for Latin America (or CRCAL by its acronym in Spanish) is to enhance competition agencies’ technical capacities. Towards this end, and sponsored by the World Bank, the CRCAL has commissioned guidelines and exchanges of information among competitors based on best international practices. This article briefly introduces these guidelines.

The guidelines on exchanges of information among competitors are designed to serve two purposes. First, to provide the Antitrust Agencies of the member countries with guiding principles and a general framework for analyzing horizontal collaborations among competitors. Second, to provide guidance to businesses and their legal advisors on how Agencies may wish to assess the legality of these formal or informal agreements. The hope is that such guidelines will contribute to greater transparency and predictability of antitrust assessments, and to the adoption of pro-competitive collaborations while deterring anticompetitive ones.

The document recommends an analytical framework for the assessment of horizontal agreements among competitors based on best international practices. In this context, it refers to “competitor collaboration, or agreement” as a set of agreements or exchanges of information among competitors, which allows the pur