The Office of Fair Trading has today issued its first advice under its new short-form opinion process. The process is to be used by the OFT to provide guidance in a timely manner to businesses on the application of competition law to collaboration arrangements between competitors that raise novel or unresolved competition issues.
The UK competition regime no longer offers parties the ability to notify agreements. However, the process has been introduced by the OFT in response to concerns expressed by business that potentially beneficial collaborative arrangements were not going ahead due to concerns about infringing competition law. The OFT will only offer this process for a limited number of cases per year, and will choose these by applying its prioritisation principles.
The advice issued today provides guidance on a joint purchasing agreement in the grocery sector. Wholesalers Makro-Self Service and Palmer & Harvey received guidance that the agreement, which enables the parties to secure better prices from common suppliers, is unlikely to restrict competition in the market although it gives rise to increased contact between the parties. However, in order to prevent the exchange of sensitive information which the OFT considered could potentially lead to a reduction in competition, the parties have agreed to ensure the data they supply to each other is general and aggregated and does not contain any specific or sensitive information.
All short-form opinions will be made public and a non-confidential version of the opinion in this case will be made available on the OFT website shortly.
Please see here for the OFT's press release.
This article was written for Law-Now, CMS Cameron McKenna's free online information service. To register for Law-Now, please go to www.law-now.com/law-now/mondaq
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The original publication date for this article was 27/04/2010.
