Proposed amendments to the Kazakhstan Antitrust Law

(Aidyn Bikebayev, Senior Partner, Sayat Zholshy & Partners)

Slide 1. The key issues of the current Kazakhstan Antitrust Law

Last year, at the request of the Economic Research Institute of the Kazakhstan Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, I prepared an antitrust (competition) regulatory and legal framework analysis report which also covered the practice of antitrust law application. This work was performed in the run-up to the new amendments to the antitrust law which are being considered by the Kazakhstan Parliament right now. In this report I classify the current law issues into 5 groups:

erroneous recognition of the consumer protection objective as a conceptual guideline of antitrust authorities;

legislative provisions which unreasonably and unfairly restrict business practices;

enhancement of the efficiency of measures intended to prevent the competition restrictive practices on the part of government authorities;

legislative provisions which impair the effectiveness of control over monopolistic activities in the market; and

needed fundamental changes in the provisions regarding unfair competition.

Many of the proposed amendments were included into the draft law. However, unfortunately, the majority of urgent issues are not being solved. Of course, I will not be able to cover all the developments in this area, that is why I will focus only on some of them.

Slide 2. Antitrust law: erroneous objective

The main issue of antitrust regulation in our country is the erroneous recognition of the consumer protection and price control objective as a conceptual guideline of antitrust authorities. The draft law does not solve this issue. I mentioned this problem in the previous forums of corporate lawyers and other events, and I wrote a fair number of articles regarding the same. Let me summarize. The idea that the antitrust authorities’ mission is to control prices and to protect consumers is deeply seated in our conscience. I will not expatiate upon the reasons of such phenomenon. The most important is that such approach contradicts the internationally accepted understanding of the antitrust regulator’s role.