No, that’s not the European Economic Community, but rather the slightly less well-known Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC), thank you for asking…
The Memorandum of Understanding, signed in late July in Geneva, is designed to allow the two agencies to “cooperate in addressing anti-competitive conduct in their respective regions, capacity building and research,” according to AAT’s old friend and CCC 2.0 executive, Dr. Willard Mwemba.
His EEC counterpart, Mr. Arman Shakkaliyev, Minister in charge of Competition & Antitrust Regulation, said that the future collaboration “opened up new opportunities” for closer interaction and the sharing of experiences and knowledge as to specific investigations, most notably, in addition to the two agencies planning more standard cooperative ventures such as joint conferences or training seminars.
Says Andreas Stargard, a competition lawyer at Primerio Ltd.:
“This latest MoU represents yet a further step in the clear and unmistakable direction of ever-closer cooperation between enforcement agencies on the African continent that we have seen for a few years now. The advice to be taken from this is fairly simple: Companies operating in more than one country in Africa should take note of this development, as their local ‘competition reputation‘ from one jurisdiction will doubtless precede them in the other, given the information-sharing between African watchdogs, which catches many corporates seemingly unawares…”
