Rajya Sabha passes Competition Amendment Bill
1 min read . Updated: 03 Apr 2023, 06:05 PM IST
PremiumCCI is now working on rules and regulations needed to give effect to the new provisions added to the law, especially, the scheme for commitment and settlement meant to reduce litigation by way of negotiated settlements.
New Delhi: Rajya Sabha on Monday passed the Competition Amendment Bill, 2023, which seeks to sync the two-decade old anti-trust law with the changes in the economy.
Having been cleared in both the houses of parliament, the Bill is set to become law once it gets presidential assent. Lok Sabha had passed the Bill last week without much debate amid ruckus in the Parliament.
Competition Commission of India (CCI), the regulator, is now working on rules and regulations needed to give effect to the new provisions added to the law, especially, the scheme for commitment and settlement meant to reduce litigation by way of negotiated settlements. This scheme is available to cases of anti-competitive agreements and abuse of dominance, but not to cartels.
Also, the new provisions expand the scope of CCI’s merger regulation by bringing deals worth more than ₹2,000 crore requiring regulator clearance.
A highlight of the Bill is a change in the penalty provision. The Bill seeks to defines ‘turnover’ for the purpose of penalty as global turnover derived from all the products and services by a person or an enterprise. The idea is to levy penalty as a percentage of global turnover of the offending company, moving away from the current practice of levying a part of the local or relevant market turnover as penalty.
It introduces more clarity to the provisions relating to merger regulation that was proposed in the original bill introduced in parliament last year.
The parliamentary standing committee on finance led by BJP’s Jayant Sinha had reviewed the Bill.