International Law

Viorica Carare, the General Director of the Agency, told to journalists that within half a year during which the Agency exists it received 60 claims and there have been decisions taken on 31 of them.

What regards the most famous of them (Bomba supermarket and Sun Communications) she said that she had nothing to add to the information that had been previously communicated. So, this is the very problem that I told recently. We know absolutely nothing about the Agency's activity and the way how it takes its own decisions what has led to a number of very negative reactions in media. And the head of the Agency still considers that there's no necessity to provide any additional information...

And yesterday (on October 30) there was a press-conference organized by the Foreign Investors Association of Moldova. It was stated during the press-conference that the Association had always stood for creation of the Agency for Protection of Competition. However, because of the lack of experience of the Agency's employees it has taken a series of illegal decisions and goes beyond its authority.

For instance, in summer the Agency obliged all notaries to get its approvals when authorizing all contracts of sales of shares in limited liability companies what contradicted to legislation that required such control only over the companies with a dominant position in the market.

The FIA also mentions that when determining a company's dominant position the Agency uses its own methodology that has no legal power because it has not been passed through an expert evaluation and published in the Official Monitor.* And the most serious is that the Agency tries to legalize those abuses by lobbying amendments into the Law on Protection of Competition...

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* the Official Monitor (Monitorul Oficial) - the official edition where all legal acts adopted by all public authorities in Moldova are published. Under Moldovan laws all legal normative acts should be published in the Official Monitor to enter into force.