The Competition Commission of Pakistan (CCP) has been awarded three-star rating by the London-based Global Competition Review (GCR), in its annual ranking of the world's top antitrust/competition authorities. The GCR has also shown the CCP’s performance indicator with an upwards arrow as “improving upon its previous accomplishments,” said a press release received by WealthPK. The CCP’s three-star rating brings it at par with the competition authorities of some other countries, including Switzerland, South Africa, Belgium, Israel, and Romania, the document said. GCR’s Rating Enforcement and star-rating is the result of an independent and objective process scrutinising information and data supplied by the competition authorities, the GCR’s daily reporting, and interviews with lawyers and economists on the quality of an agency’s work in their jurisdiction. Their analysis rates each authority on a scale of one to five stars.

“The Competition Commission of Pakistan has made several substantial strides in the past couple of years and re-established itself as one of the region’s key competition enforcers,” the GCR noted in Pakistan Country Brief in the Rating Enforcement. Chairperson of CCP Rahat Kaunain Hassan, who re-joined the commission in July 2020, credited the achievement to CCP’s team. The international benchmarking would help CCP maintain the right focus and contribute to its better performance, she added. Rahat Hassan said that while the CCP remained committed to enforcing competition law and making policy interventions where due, the benefits of competition law enforcement will only be visible to the public when cartels shall pay the penalty for rigging the economy. Judicial review of cartel cases thus needs to be prioritized, she added.

The GCR particularly recognised and appreciated the CCP’s performance in enforcement, saying, “With just 45 non-administrative competition staff and a starting budget of approximately €4 million, the CCP does well with its modest resources.” Referring to CCP’s sugar order, it noted, “CCP’s most eye-catching achievement of 2021 was the decision to impose a record fine of about € 200.6 million (PKR 44 billion) in August 2021 against several companies for ‘compulsive or pathological’ collusion in the sugar sector.” Similarly, the dawn raids (search and inspection), according to the GCR, proved to be an effective tool for the CCP as the dawn raids in poultry, milk, tractor manufacturers, and other sectors resulted in helped uncover evidence of anti-competitive activities in these sectors.

The GCR recognized that the CCP made great strides on the legal front and achieved its financial autonomy. The GCR noted, “Underpinning its successes in 2021 was a major victory before the Lahore High Court in October 2020, which upheld the Competition Act as constitutionally valid. That endorsement was strengthened further in 2021 by the Islamabad and Sindh high courts.” Achieving financial autonomy has been termed as a major development in 2021 whereby the government agreed to hand over 3% of the fees and charges levied by a group of five regulatory bodies. “The decision was made after a decade of lobbying by the commission, as well as coordination and communication with the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Law and Justice.”

Credit: Independent News Pakistan-WealthPk