The Antitrust Rewards Program
Click here to read the full article onlineThe Antitrust Rewards Program explains who and under what conditions people could access rewards in exchange for delivering information to destroy cartels. The agency has established which criteria are defined for the application of the reward mechanism (economic incentives), with the aim of maximizing the detection, prosecution and punishment of cartels. According to the Competition Act, the agency may grant economic rewards in favor of people that provide decisive information that allows the agency to detect, investigate and sanction cartels. As is known, cartels are infractions especially difficult to detect, since their members usually carry out co-ordinations in a secretive way and actively try to eliminate the evidence of their existence, their operations and monitoring. In this way, competition authorities in the world tend to encourage the collaboration of actors who may have participated in the infringement or have access to information about its existence. For this matter, they can resort to mechanisms such as reward those people who, without having participated in the infraction directly, have become aware of it because of their position (for example, a worker or official of the offending company) or because of the market in which they operate (for example, a supplier or distributor who is aware of the anti-competitive agreement reached by a group of companies in the sector).