China’s Antitrust Tigers Grow Teeth

China's competition law regulators have taken important steps to strengthen the enforcement of its competition regime, with a number of cartel investigations, some further implementation rules, and another conditional merger control decision. Imprisonment is the maximum penalty as a result of the above.

In this review, we focus on recent cartel investigations by the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), as well as the draft implementation rules recently published by the NDRC and the other regulators responsible for enforcing the PRC Anti-Monopoly Law (AML), namely the State Administration of Industry and Commerce (SAIC) and the Ministry of Commerce (MOFCOM). We also cover the decision by MOFCOM's Anti-Monopoly Bureau (AMB) to impose conditions on the acquisition of Texas-based pharmaceutical company Alcon by Switzerland's Novartis.