The Twinning Project Steering Committee held its sixth meeting

On September 22, the regular sixth meeting of the Supervisory Board of the Twinning project "Support to the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine in the further approximation of legal, procedural and case enforcement practices with EU antitrust and merger control practices" took place online.

At the beginning of the meeting, the Chair of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine and the Project Leader from the Ukrainian side Olha Pishchanska listed the main areas of work carried out with the support of European partners for the previous three months reporting period.

"Undoubtedly, an important achievement now is the adoption by the Parliament of Ukraine in the first reading of the draft law № 5431, prepared by Member of Parliament Roksolana Pidlasa with the support of our European colleagues. We are currently preparing to participate in a roundtable to discuss the amendments submitted to this document. We also carried out a number of expert missions during the reporting period. Among others, the key ones are on problematic issues in the pharmaceutical and media markets and on the peculiarities of the calculation of penalties in European competition agencies" - said the Сhair of the AMCU.

Olha Pishchanska announced the approval of the communication and advocacy training plan, which has been prepared and will be conducted for the staff of the AMCU and Regional Offices by EU specialists.

"I am grateful to the partners for their work and professional contribution to the implementation of our joint project and competitive reform in general. I am confident that we will soon be able to reach a significant result and continue to move forward at a faster pace" - said the Chair of the AMCU.

Commenting on the general state of the project, Twinning RTA Sarunas Pajarskas noted that due to quarantine restrictions, the number of direct missions to Kyiv had to be significantly reduced, thus - in some way - saving the project budget. At the same time, according to him, the same restrictions slowed down the implementation of the Projects plan.

The Project Leader from the EU side Sarunas Kaserauskas expressed his opinion on the likelihood of extension of the project

"We may need to consider continuing the project. Because now we see that it is unlikely that all the plans will be realized given the pandemic and the obstacles it creates. We must also take into account the pace of work of the Parliament of Ukraine. We will hope that Verkhovna Rada will soon pass the darft law № 5431", - said Sarunas Kaserauskas.

The participants of the meeting exchanged views on the results of the work, discussed and approved plans for the next quarter and agreed on the next reporting meeting in mid-December 2021.

It will be recalled that the project started in May last year and aims to bring the work of the AMCU closer to the best European standards of competition protection. It is implemented with the support of the Lithuanian Competition Council, the Federal Ministry of Economy and Energy of Germany and the Romanian Competition Council. In general, it is designed for two years and is funded by the European Union.