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Plenary I: Overview of Anti-Cartel Enforcement Manual Chapters Chapter 8 Cartel Awareness, Outreach & Compliance: Carlos Mena Labarthe 2012 ICN Cartel Workshop Panama City, Panama October 2 – 4, 2012. Awareness, outreach & compliance. The youngest chapter in the Manual (2012) Objective:
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Plenary I: Overview of Anti-Cartel Enforcement Manual Chapters Chapter 8 Cartel Awareness, Outreach & Compliance: Carlos Mena Labarthe 2012 ICN Cartel WorkshopPanama City, PanamaOctober 2 – 4, 2012
Awareness, outreach & compliance • The youngest chapter in the Manual (2012) • Objective: • Generate practical and effective anti-cartel enforcement policies • Approach towards these activities: Cost effective, focused on prevention of breaches. • Targeted to key stakeholders through education. • Compliance and competition culture.
Cartel Awareness • General public’s knowledge or perception of anti-cartel laws and possible sanctions. • Education on detrimental effects of cartels, deleterious effects on society, consumers, etc. • Use of publicity, press conferences, electronic and printed media, broadcast, all towards a proper and effective dissemination. • Awareness and information supplied serve as intelligence to generate new investigations.
Awareness efforts Identify the most effective channels to deliver the message, receive feedback to better tailor each agency’s strategy… • Expected results: • Receive leads for new investigations. • Achieve effective prevention, detection and deterrence. • Educated stakeholders (public at large & specific groups).
Outreach Outreach is a specific type of awareness activity in which the agency takes an active role, such as providing training to specific groups (e.g. procurement agencies or government institutions) • Outreach tools: • Educate key stakeholders; • Build and maintain good relations with them; • Define priority sectors; • Presentations, seminars improve understanding of competition policy e.g. judges; and • Education of companies and employees, include fines and criminal sanctions.
Compliance • Compliance refers to the efforts businesses make to prevent infringements of competition laws • Risk based approach (tailored to the specific risks faced by each business). • The goal is to generate a culture of compliance i.e. actions to generate useful resources for each company. • Useful to avoid financial penalties, criminal conviction, loss of reputation, lawsuits, etcetera. • Part of a corporate governance program. • Requires serious commitment from the highest levels of management. • movie ICN vFINALPANAMA.wmv
Challenges ahead • Develop more techniques and materials to disseminate the message by competition agencies in their cartel-related outreach efforts. • Effectively attract allies in targeted key stakeholders, for effective prevention, deterrence and enforcement. • Definition and prioritization of each agency’s goals and strategies, given the limited resources, and each agency’s maturity, particular needs and availability of resources. • Overcoming both the resistance from certain sectors and groups which may have competing commercial interests; and difficulties of outreach to small and medium enterprises. • Fostering compliance culture even as an integrant part of a corporate governance program in corporations.