1. Introduction
The Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) is an
adjudicatory administrative entity with jurisdiction to
investigate, prosecute and judge anticompetitive conducts. While
CADE's Tribunal is responsible for deciding the cases,
CADE's General-Superintendence (GS) concentrates all tasks
related to investigation and prosecution of anticompetitive
conduct.
As these two tasks are carried out by two bodies within the same
agency and as the line between them may sometimes be blurred, the
Brazilian Antitrust Law provides for three types of administrative
procedures that the GS may use to investigate possible
anticompetitive conduct, with different levels of investigative and
prosecution powers and different levels of rights granted to the
investigated parties
