Competition rules must be harmonized, ICC meeting hears
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| Charles James, Philip Lowe and Thomas Leary discuss the global convergence of competition rules. |
New York, 18 December 2002 - Three of the world's top competition officials from the US and EU have met with representatives of ICC's Competition Commission to discuss the global convergence of competition rules.
At the Commission's recent meeting in New York, Charles Ja
mes, until recently the US Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Policy, Philip Lowe, the European Commission's Director General for Competition and Thomas Leary of the US Federal Trade Commission all agreed that competition systems both at the international and national level had to respond to fundamental changes in the way businesses were now operating .
The increasingly international nature of business transactions and the proliferation of different rules has exposed inconsistencies between national systems, they said.
Mr James said the recent GE/Honeywell merger decision, in which EU and US authorities came to different decisions, revealed fundamental differences in the way the EU and US viewed competition policy.
He noted that the positive outcome of this case had been the increase in dialogue between US and EU competition authorities, which have now started to move toward each other on other substantive issues.
Referring to discussions in the World Trade Organization and other international fora, Mr Leary said that although competition policy experts had begun to discuss convergence at an international level, it still remained unclear which system the world should converge towards.
Even within the U.S. many problems remained unresolved relating to the coexistence of federal, state, and private remedies, he said
When asked how the European Commission was responding to unprecedented
recent reversals of three of its merger decisions by the European Court of First Instance, Philip Lowe outlined the range of measures which the Commission was envisaging in its ongoing merger review process. These included the appointment of a Chief Economist, a broader strengthening of economic expertise, the creation of a specific internal decision scrutiny function and extended rights of notifying parties in the course of a merger investigation.
ICC Competition Commission
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