Anti-competitive conduct difficult to detect: Ain

MANY cartels operate in secrecy which makes it difficult for the Independent Consumer and Competition Commission (ICCC) to detect them, according to commissioner and chief executive officer Paulus Ain.
He said it was so difficult to trace them that since the commission was established, it had managed to deal with just one case.
“This case was a complaint from a leading supplier of a major grocery item in PNG, alleging a price fixing cartel between some wholesalers and retailers in PNG,” he said.
A cartel is a group of competitors (or likely competitors) who agree to fix prices or control supply of a particular good or service directly or indirectly, instead of independently competing against each other. It is anti-competitive and cheats consumers and other businesses of an otherwise competitive market outcome. Signs that may indicate their existence include:

• ABNORMAL or suspicious price movements, for example, different brands of a product increase in price at around the same time;
• INEXPLICABLE actions by suppliers, for example, suppliers refusing to supply to customers in certain geographical areas; and,
• SUSPICIOUS bids, for example, the same group of bidders participating in tenders and each one appears to take turns to win. And identical mistakes in different tender submissions.

Ain said the ICCC in 2019 launched its Leniency Policy to encourage cartelists (individuals and corporations) to voluntarily report their cartel activities in exchange for ICCC’s leniency from prosecution.
“The ICCC will continue a nationwide awareness on cartel conducts and on the Leniency Policy in 2024 and to also understand the markets (economy) in terms of cartels,” he said.