"Anti - Monopoly Law" Of Foreign Anti - Monopoly Law And Its Enlightenment To Perfecting China 's Anti - Monopoly Law

Cartels consist of more than one firm, and engage in price-fixing, bid-rigging,allocation of resources, and market shares in the market. Cartels have had a harmful impacton consumer welfare, public interest, and national economy. Through organising a cartel,the cartel members achieve great profits and satisfy their ambitions. The common goal ofprofit maximisation requires the cartel members to cooperate together and to work together.It is obvious that, cartels have to be detected and punished by competition authorities.Regarding the penalties for cartel offenders, different jurisdictions have had differentapproaches to the cartel offenders, generally there are three kinds of punishments whichare available to punish cartels these are remedies, imprisonment, and fines. However, thedifficult problem is how to discover and detect secret cartels. Therefore, the competitionauthorities published a programme which is called a “leniency programme” to detect anddiscover more and more secret cartels. In1978, the DOJ published its first leniencyprogramme, but this leniency programme completely failed, because of its lack of certaintyand transparency. Later on, in1993and in1994, the DOJ published its Cooperate LeniencyPolicy and the Individual Leniency Policy respectively. The EU launched its first leniencyprogramme in1996, but this leniency programme was not applied to any cartel cases, so itfailed. Later on, the leniency programme in1996was revised twice, the2002leniencynotice and the2006leniency notice respectively. Both the leniency policies in the US andin the EU achieved great succes in detecting and punishing cartels.China’s Anti-monopoly law was published on30August2007, and took effect from1August2008. It has been argued that section2of article46of China’s anti-monopoly lawis the original leniency programme of China’s anti-monopoly law, and the legal basis of theleniency programme, and it is obvious that the leniency programme in China’sAnti-monopoly Law needs to be improved. The following suggestions should beconsidered in the process of improving the leniency programme, and should be given to the legislators and the Anti-monopoly law agencies:(1) the leniency treatment;(2) theconditions of the leniency programme;(3) the procedure of the leniency programme. Inaddition, in the process of establishing a leniency programme, the legislators and theAnti-monopoly law agencies have to refer to the leniency programme in the US and in theEU.