Recent developments in Latin American antitrust

Chair

Professor Ioannis Lianos (UCL Laws)

Speakers

• Julián Peña (Allende & Brea Abogados)
• Sebastián Castro Quiroz (University of Oxford)
• Juan David Gutierrez (University of Oxford)
• Andrés Palacios Lleras (UCL Laws)
• Murilo Lubambo de Melo (UCL Laws)

Organised by the UCL Centre for Law, Economics and Society

About the event

Antitrust regimes in Latin American have undergone considerable changes in the last two and a half decades. The more recent reforms that have taken place in the last years aim to improve the effectiveness of the enforcement agencies as they investigate and prosecute anticompetitive conducts. They introduce or amend the leniency regimes, increase monetary fines and extend criminal liability to some anticompetitive conducts like hard-core cartels.

Even so, it is not clear that these new reforms, or their predecessors, bridge the differences that distinguish the regimes themselves. Some important differences have been furthered, including those related with the administrative or judicial nature of the enforcement authorities or the evidentiary standards required for proving certain conducts. Hence, it may well be that these recent reforms accentuate the differences between these regimes rather than making them more congenial.

In this event we would like to address these reforms and discuss how take place and why. On one hand, these reforms can be taken as mere examples of the diffusion of antitrust institutions and theories developed elsewhere and that find their ways into Latin American legal regimes. If this is so, we would like to address how this diffusion process takes place and, if possible, discus about the roles that lawyers, economists and consultants play in these developments.

On the other, they can be taken as a new chapter that evidences the commitment of local politics with protecting competition. Contrary to previous reforms, these are being discussed with the civil society and are submitted for their enactment and approval to politically accountable bodies. If so, we would like to address the pillars of the political support given to competition in general and to the particular content of these reforms in particular. Perhaps the efforts to acclimatise antitrust have rendered positive fruits, both at the level of everyday politics as well as at the structure of the different professions that interact in this field of law.