ANNUAL REPORT 2010 - Konkurentsiamet

YEAR 2010 IN THE COMPETITION DIVISION
Competition supervision
In 2010 special attention was continuously paid to the fight against hard core cartels.
Since the reorganisation of the Competition Authority at the beginning of 2008, the
Authority has considered criminal proceedings to be one of its priority fields. The
number of criminal proceedings increased, as well as their complicacy. Extensive cases
and analyses should also be highlighted, which have observed the organisation of some
business sectors as a whole. In several cases the Competition Authority submitted
proposals for the amendment of acts.
In the supervision department the characteristic feature of the year 2010 was a significant
increase of the number of criminal proceedings. While in 2009 the number of criminal
proceedings was 8, then only a year later the relevant figure was 14. Such development
brought along an extremely high load for the staff overseeing the criminal matters and
furthermore several employees inside the division were involved in the assistance. At the
end of the year the recruitment of new employees started due to the increased workload.
One major factor causing an increase of the load of criminal proceedings was the
enforcement of the leniency programme. In global practice leniency programmes are
extensively used for the detection of cartels. According to the programme, the person having
first informed the law enforcement authority of a cartel or cooperated essentially with the
authority shall be exempted from liability. Before the enforcement of the leniency
programme, Estonia was one of the few developed countries lacking this programme in a
clear form. During the year several applications were submitted to the Competition
Authority, on which basis criminal procedures were initiated. Although the experiences of
several countries have shown that launching a leniency programme could be rather difficult,
the Estonian experience should be considered successful. It is good to say that various
leading law offices dealing with competition law have understood that a leniency
programme is a serious instrument and its use should be recommended to the clients.
In the beginning of 2010 the criminal case concerning timber transportation public
procurement procedures organised by the State Forest Management Centre (RMK) was
handed over to the Prosecutor’s Office, which developed into the largest charge of a socalled
cartel crime in Estonia until now. RMK carried out several public procurement
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