You Know It Makes Sense – Competition Law Compliance

One of the few areas of British business that have not experienced a downturn in recent months is the need to comply with competition law. On the contrary, this area is more buoyant than ever before, partly due to the swingeing fines that the competition law regulators continue to dish out, and partly due to a major compliance blitz that the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) (the UK's principal competition law regulator) has recently been waging.

Rather like a crocodile, competition law has a nasty habit of lurking below the waterline, and can therefore easily be overlooked until it suddenly grabs the unwary. Some types of behaviour – price-fixing cartels, for example, or bid-rigging, or resale price maintenance – are widely known to be against the law. But other types of business practices are less obviously non-compliant. How many businesspeople know, for example, that loyalty discounts, or trade association membership rules, or the exchange of commercial information