Maersk’s initiative consists of an article from Camila Holtse sharing insights and challenges faced, as global head of competition law for the company, when implementing and promoting antitrust compliance.
Compliance, as well as time to market, constitutes a major strategic challenge for economic players but also for authorities and institutions. What is the rule without the knowledge of this rule, the understanding of issues and risks at stake ? This is most apt when it comes to behavioral rules. Competition law is now part of companies’ codes of conduct which imply for staffs to act in a responsible and ethical manner. Being aware of competition law rules is therefore much more than a legal requirement. It is part of the corporate culture.
Today Competition Law Compliance Programmes are widespread. However, from the perspective of Heads of competition law / Compliance officers in charge, maintaining such programmes as top priorities is not a walk in the park. To the contrary, it is a real challenge to always keep them up especially when they are themselves in competition with many compliance requirements imposed by legislations, e.g. anti bribery, money laundering.
Concurrences identified this issue and started months ago to propose dedicated events. The Awards Compliance Initiative, that I’d like to commend, will be the high point of exchanges started in February 2019 at Concurrences’ initiative but also, and it has to be stressed, in the framework of a dedicated working group set-up by the French Competition Authority in 2020. More broadly, it will gather international actors, authorities and institutions and allow them to share their views and more practically, their best recipes and tools.
Compliance should be in focus for competition authorities. Prevention is always better than cure. Therefore, the Antitrust Compliance Summit & Awards initiative is to be lauded.
From being a fringe activity for the legal profession, competition law compliance has become a key pillar of good corporate citizenship over the last 15 years or so. So much legal expertise, business insight and creativity goes into ever-more sophisticated and bespoke compliance programs. It is about time to recognize outstanding accomplishments in this important field, and I am very pleased that Concurrences has given me a chance to support their initiative.
I am very delighted to be part of the Antitrust Compliance Summit & Awards Steering Committee together with other distinguished members.
The Italian Competition Authority strongly supports this much-needed initiative of Concurrences which contributes to promote and strengthen a competition culture at global level and I hope its innovative format will attract as many participant agencies as possible in sharing their experiences in evaluating compliance programmes for the purpose of potential fine reductions for businesses.
Since the adoption of our own guidelines in 2018, antitrust programmes in Italy have become an increasingly important component of businesses’ general compliance programmes. Our practice has shown that designing and implementing antitrust programmes is not a “box-checking exercise” and there is no “one size fits all” type of programme.
I believe this initiative, by exchanging best practices for successful antitrust compliance, will surely be of interest for our agency as well as many other competition agencies around the world.
Concurrences is recognizing the importance of compliance programs in the competition law field by staging a series of virtual conferences on the topic and giving awards to leaders in this field.
This is a very valuable contribution to our field. For too long competition law compliance has taken a back seat to other areas, especially anti-corruption. Much of the blame for this lies at the feet of competition law enforcers, who had refused to recognize compliance programs, preferring instead to focus only on collecting fines. In contrast, in other areas of law enforcement, the value of compliance and government’s role in recognizing and promoting it, was readily recognized. Recently this negative approach in competition law has started to change, and we now have an opportunity to see more energy, imagination and resources directed into competition law compliance.
Those who do the difficult work of competition law compliance deserve to be recognized and encouraged. At the same time, we need incentives to move beyond the old approaches of dusty manuals and legal lectures, into steps that make programs work – things like empowering compliance officers, dealing with incentives, evaluating what program steps actually are working.
Congratulations to Concurrences for its leadership in promoting competition law compliance efforts.
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