On February 3, an ad-hoc online meeting of the BRICS Working Group on Cartels was held, organized by the Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russia (FAS Russia). Alexey Ivanov, Director of the International BRICS Competition Law and Policy Centre, delivered a presentation titled “BRICS Cooperation in Digital Cartels Investigation.” The meeting focused on discussing the development of global standards for international cooperation in combating cross-border cartels. Special attention was paid to practical ways to deepen cooperation between BRICS competition authorities in identifying cross-border anti-competitive practices in global agri-food markets.
Fighting cartels has been established as a priority area in the joint statement of the heads of BRICS competition authorities, adopted in September last year following the IX BRICS International Competition Conference in Cape Town, South Africa, noted Anastasia Dokukina, Deputy Head of the Department for International Economic Cooperation of the FAS Russia. As the next step, FAS proposed developing a single practice-oriented BRICS document on combating cross-border cartels. The document aims to consolidate the work of UNCTAD, ICN, and OECD into a universal guide useful for both experienced and resource-limited competition authorities.
Given that UNCTAD is currently facing financial constraints, it was decided to initiate this work within the BRICS framework.
"We truly believe that BRICS has the potential to develop corresponding global standards and subsequently promote them on the UNCTAD platform as a joint initiative of the BRICS competition authorities,"
Anastasia emphasized.
Turning to practice, Alexey Ivanov proposed examining a specific cross-border case. This concerns global grain trade and digitalization processes in this sector. As noted in the BRICS Competition Centre’s report “From Fields to Futures: Competition, Financialization, and Digitalization in Global Grain Value Chains,” presented last year at the BRICS Competition Conference in Cape Town, the global grain trading market is characterized by a stable oligopolistic structure, and the introduction of digital platforms for data exchange among major participants increases the risks of anti-competitive behavior.
Digital platforms such as Covantis and Tract effectively serve as transaction execution venues where all post-contractual information — logistics, payments, supply terms — is accumulated. All this data is aggregated and made available to a privileged group of dominant grain traders, such as ADM, Cargill, Louis Dreyfus, and Bunge. At the same time, the actual architecture and design of these platforms remain opaque, significantly reducing enforcement effectiveness.
"The risks of collusion here are considerable, including in the classical sense of cartel agreements, since sensitive commercial information circulates within a limited circle of oligopolistic participants,"
Ivanov stressed.
International cooperation in this area is critically important because the global nature of such platforms significantly reduces the effectiveness of national enforcement. The mentioned companies operate along the entire global value chain. In this context, national enforcement measures often fall short, as remedies are required that apply across the entire chain — on a global scale.
According to Ivanov, the first step toward cooperation in this case should be the creation of an effective mechanism for information collection and exchange. BRICS regulators could draw on the Catena-X case — a platform for information sharing along the automotive value chain — examined by the German competition authority (Bundeskartellamt).
Joint actions would allow regulators to gain a much more complete understanding of how such platforms operate and achieve disclosure of internal data exchange and processing mechanisms than is possible through fragmented national investigations, he emphasized.
Relying on the theory of harm developed in the Catena-X case, an investigation into the Covantis platform could be initiated, including focusing on potential cartel aspects of its activities. According to Ivanov, this does not involve conducting a joint investigation, but rather parallel investigations in BRICS countries, accompanied by coordinated information exchange, alignment of harm theories, and the application of already tested analytical approaches — particularly those used in the Catena-X case.
"Cooperation is an effective tool to counter the growing concentration and cartelization of global markets. For this, both bilateral information exchange mechanisms and the UNCTAD platform for sharing data, expertise, and knowledge already exist,"
concluded the Director of the BRICS Competition Centre.
The event was attended by representatives of antitrust authorities from BRICS countries and experts in the field of antitrust law.
The BRICS Working Group on Cartels was established pursuant to the resolution adopted at the 8th United Nations Conference to Review the UN Set of Competition Rules and Policies in October 2020. The International BRICS Competition Law and Policy Centre provides methodological and expert support for the Working Group’s activities.
