India today called for greater cooperation among competition authorities from across the world in the wake of growing number of cross-border M&A deals and possible anti-competitive practices across boundaries.
“Business and money know no geographical boundaries. The increasing integration of the world economy in the form of multi-jurisdictional mergers and cross-border anti-competitive conduct makes international cooperation in this arena vitally important for all modern competition authorities,” Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said.
“This takes greater significance in view of the increasing trade flows among BRICS nations that are now on the horizon,” the Prime Minister said after inaugurating the third BRICS International Competition Conference here.
The two-day conference, organised by the Competition Commission of India (CCI), is being attended by top officials from competition authorities in BRICS countries and other parts of the world.
The panel would also sign an MoU with the European Union (EU) on competition issues, while a Delhi Accord shall be signed with BRICS competition authorities on the second day of the conference tomorrow.
The ongoing summit would discuss various issues and challenges in competition enforcement in BRICS countries and take the agenda of cooperation among the BRICS competition authorities forward from the earlier two conferences.
The conference is organised biennially by one of the BRICS competition authorities. The first such conference was held in Russia in September 2009, and the second BRICS ICC was organised in China in September 2011.
In his welcome address, Competition Commission of India Chairman Ashok Chawla hoped that the summit would provide an opportunity for the five BRICS countries to share the challenges faced in their respective countries and gain from the experiences of good practices of mature competition authorities and the international community at large.
Delivering keynote address, Corporate Affairs Minister Sachin Pilot asked the BRICS competition authorities “to embark on an exercise of jointly addressing the common challenges they face in enforcing competition regimes’’.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said that cooperation in competition policy and enforcement is of vital importance and hoped that the summit would provide an opportunity to the authorities to share their “experiences regarding common challenges and articulate a new consensus on key issues’’.
“BRICS Competition Authorities are also ideally positioned to bridge the gap between mature competition authorities and nascent ones,” he said.