The Serbian Competition Authority has increased its dawn raid activity over the past year. The authority increased its administrative capacity and provided training to its employees, enabling it to conduct simultaneous dawn raids at several locations. During these dawn raids, the authority used the IT Forensic Tool to collect electronic documents.
Although conducting dawn raids has been a part of the authority's remit since 2009, no such raids were carried out until the end of 2015. To date, the authority has conducted dawn raids in approximately 10 of its proceedings. The majority of these were conducted to establish the existence of restrictive agreements. Only one dawn raid was carried out in an abuse of dominance case. In the authority's vertical agreement cases, the dawn raids were conducted to uncover resale price maintenance practices. The horizontal agreement cases involved bid rigging and, in one case, information exchange and concerted practices.
The most recent dawn raid was conducted at the premises of importers and distributors of baby clothes and equipment. The authority suspected that these companies had infringed competition law by entering into restrictive resale price maintenance agreements. The dawn raid was conducted at three different locations in Belgrade.
In addition, the authority drafted a brief guideline on the rights and obligations of the parties in dawn raids, which aims to familiarise market participants with its dawn raid procedures. The authority also announced that it would continue to investigate market participants' compliance with the competition rules, particularly regarding their pricing policies.
For further information on this topic please contact Srdjana Petronijevic at Moravcevic Vojnovic i Partneri in cooperation with Schoenherr by telephone (+381 11 320 26 00) or email ([email protected]). The Moravcevic Vojnovic i Partneri website can be accessed at www.schoenherr.rs.
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