RTO firms are reminded of their obligations to ensure compliance with competition law (including the prohibitions against anti-competitive agreements and abuse of a dominant position in Chapters 1 and 2 of the Competition Act 1998 and the criminal cartel offence in Section 188 of the Enterprise Act 2002 as amended by the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act 2013). Those obligations include:
- (1)
not entering into any agreements with other firms where the agreement has as its object or effect an appreciable prevention, restriction or distortion of competition – for example to agree sale prices or to allocate customers. For example, if a RTO firm director called another RTO firm or a non-RTO firm and agreed to sell their products at a certain price, this would be restrictive of competition and illegal. The individuals involved could also be prosecuted for the criminal cartel offence; and
- (2)
not disclosing to, or accepting from, competitors any commercially sensitive information such as pricing or price planning, customer or market information or company strategy. For example, if a RTO firm’s employee met or called another RTO firm’s employee to find out any current or future pricing information whatsoever, that was not otherwise publicly available, whether for the purpose of attempting to fulfil any obligation under these rules or not, that could be illegal anti-competitive activity, even if the recipient of the information stayed silent.
