Powered by the BRICS Antimonopoly Centre, a BRICS Joint Antimonopoly Institute can be created
The Joint Antimonopoly Institute within the framework of the BRICS association was put forward for creation by the head of the Russian Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS), Igor Artemyev.
“We are discussing this issue, from the position of the Russian side, that this is exactly what we need to do, and we need face-to-face communication along with virtual communication,” Artemyev said during a briefing at the BRICS Competition Conference.
Thus, he answered the question of the advisability of creating, on the basis of the BRICS Antimonopoly Centre virtual platform, a joint antitrust institute with its own office, staff, task plan and budget.
"If something like this will be created in Russia, this does not mean that it will always be in Russia, this Centre can move with its employees to all our countries - to work today in Russia, tomorrow in Brazil, the day after tomorrow in China, in India, in South Africa, it doesn’t matter the place on earth where this will happen. The most important thing is that this should be a full-time endeavour, because we have a lot of problems, there is a lot of injustice in the world, and we need professional workers who will attend to this work every day, when we must deal with so many issues at once, and we must deal with them constantly, "the FAS head emphasised.
"This issue will be discussed, we have not yet reached a final opinion," said Artemyev.
Earlier, during the plenary session of the conference, he suggested taking the first step - to move from the Centre’s online collaboration to “combining virtual interaction on the basis of the platform and face-to-face interaction within expert teams, councils and public events.”
According to the official website of the Competition Conference under the auspices of the BRICS, in July 2018, with the support of the National Research University Higher School of Economics, the BRICS Antimonopoly Centre began to function as a web platform.
The mission of the Antimonopoly Centre is the union of the competition authorities and research institutions of the BRICS countries into a common state-academic partnership for a deeper understanding of the processes of the global economy, the formulation of the positions of antitrust regulators and the unification of key BRICS competition policy and legislation issues.
The objectives of the Centre are to launch and maintain a permanent web platform, organise joint research in the field of antitrust regulation in socially significant BRICS markets, to provide methodological and expert support for the activities of BRICS working groups, as well as to prepare the results of academic reports and applied research.
The structure of the Centre is divided into the Supervisory Board (Coordination Committee), consisting of representatives (heads) of the BRICS competition departments, the Research Council, whose tasks include the research and academic content of the Centre, as well as the International Expert Council to ensure international recognition of the Centre.
To date, participation in the BRICS Center does not entail any financial obligations on the part of the competition authorities of the union countries; it functions, inter alia, with the support and active participation of leading research institutions of the BRICS countries.
Source: fas.gov.ru