CIP questions the absence of Competition Authority in Mozambique

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CIP questions the absence of Competition Authority in Mozambique

2:52 CAT | 17 Jul 2018

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Mozambique’s Centre for Public Integrity (CIP) has criticised the continuing absence of a functioning Competition Regulatory Authority (ARC), five years after the legal approval of the entity, questioning the reasons for its absence.

The CIP considers that the absence of the ARC was the reason behind the government’s approval this year of the Competition in Air Transport Services decree, usurping the missing entity’s functions.

“It was not up to the government to approve the decree without its own authority having proposed or approved it,” a CIP report reads. “No other entity in Mozambique can be granted the competence to regulate matters related to competition, except the entity created solely for that purpose.”

For the CIP it was a “clear encroachment of the ARC’s powers or, at least, an implicit repeal of the law that created it”.

The CIP asks whether the ARC’s failure to take office had not been determined by interests of politico-business and economic elites, so that competition scrutiny does not cover all strategic sectors of economic activity in the country.

“Is it not the case that the competition law was approved under external pressure, since the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Competition Policy recommends the establishment of a legal framework to guide competition in national markets, without the country being prepared for it?” the CIP asks.

The organisation suggests that the Mozambican government may have been forced by carriers to approve the Air Transport Services Competition Decree prior to the ARC starting to operate.

Source: Lusa