Under The Microscope - How The Turkish Competition Authority Finds Out About Unnotified Transactions

October 2019 – Similar to many other European jurisdictions, the Turkish merger control regime requires that mergers and acquisitions that exceed certain jurisdictional thresholds are notified. Failure to notify a notifiable transaction may not only result in administrative monetary fines but risks invalidity of the transaction itself under Article 7 of the Law. 4054 on Protection of Competition ("the Law No. 4054"). However, there is always a question of how a competition authority actually becomes aware of a transaction that was not notified. A recent interesting decision of Turkish Competition Board sheds light on this issue.

Competition Authority investigation

The Turkish Competition Authority ("TCA") initiated a preliminary investigation after an anonymous complaint on August 2018 was sent to it regarding certain transactions that were entered into in the ready-mixed concrete market in the Turkish city of Yozgat in central Anatolia. Although the exact content