None of the amendments proposed in the Competition Amendment Bill 2022 —now before Parliament—will increase compliance burden for industry, the Competition Commission of India (CCI) Chairman Ashok Kumar Gupta said on Saturday.

The entire purpose of the amendments is to promote  ease of doing business while providing regulatory certainty, promoting trust based regime by doing faster market correction, Gupta said at CCI-Assocham organised 7th Annual International Conference on Competition Law here.

“None of the amendment is regressive and there is no need for any apprehension on this count. Just bring to my notice if you still feel any amendment is regressive and increase compliance burden. We will drop it. All the apprehension of industry must be thoroughly removed. It is not the intention of government to increase compliance burden”, Gupta said.

Meanwhile, in his address, Gupta said that enforcement of law in a global economic order requires regulators to be conscious that onerous procedures and processes do not create regulatory hurdles.

Easing of compliances

He highlighted the various steps taken by CCI for simplifying procedures, which have helped ease compliances and facilitate speedy disposal. 

“Be it the Green Channel or an automatic approval for certain combinations with no horizontal or vertical overlap; doing away with the requirement of providing information on non-compete in merger filings; revising the guidance which give parties to the combination clarification on the information to be filed; and simplifying forms for filing notices, the Commission’s endeavour has been to regulate but not burden businesses with unnecessary compliance”, Gupta said.

 He also exhorted businesses to adopt compliance practices that inspire trust between the regulator and the industry. “To make a trust-based regime sustainable, it is imperative that businesses adopt proactive competition compliance as an important element of corporate governance strategy. This will also help them compete globally. The Indian Competition Act encourages this mutual meaningful relationship between competition and corporate governance”,  Gupta added.

Proposals

Gupta highlighted that introduction of limitation period of three years; deal value threshold and settlement and commitments are three main changes proposed in the Bill and there is need to operationalise them.

He said that deal value provision — where there is lot of apprehension—will be triggered in few cases (in single digits), but it is important to capture these cases also. “Otherwise they will distort the market. It is in the larger interest that those cases are assessed by the Commission. We will also carefully formulate India nexus and consult with industry before coming with regulations”, he said.

Gupta also said that CCI was facing a big challenge in digital economy and needed to upgrade itself to cope with fast changes in the markets, which he said was already dynamic. At the same time, he noted that CCI was not lagging anyway and some of its judgements can be “role models for others also”.

Referring to the antitrust challenges posed by digital markets, Gupta highlighted that CCI is in the process of setting up a dedicated Digital Markets and Data Unit (DMDU), which will be staffed with new professional profiles such as data scientists, algorithm experts apart from the existing streams of law, economics, and finance.