Public interest and competition-restricting agreements in the jurisprudential practice of the Bydgoszcz Branch of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection
Abstract
The public interest constitutes a justification for limiting the constitutional principle of freedom of economic activity in the form of prohibiting agreements that restrict competition. It sets the scope of this limitation and identifies behaviours of entrepreneurs that will be considered anti-competitive. However, the public interest is normatively indeterminate, which results in various definitions depending on the adopted doctrinal basis of competition policy. This article presents the understanding of this term as adopted in doctrine and jurisprudence. This serves as a starting point for researching the method of identifying the public interest in the jurisprudential practice of the Branch of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection in Bydgoszcz. To achieve this goal, decisions concerning agreements restricting competition issued by the President of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection – Branch of the Office in Bydgoszcz, since the effective date of the Act of 16 February 2007, as well as court judgments resulting from appeals filed in these cases, were analysed. The analysis led to the conclusion that despite formally examining the admissibility of this intervention in each case, the efforts of the President of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection focus primarily on demonstrating that entrepreneurs enter into competition-restricting agreements, thus violating Article 6 (1) of the Act of 16 February 2007.
Keywords:
public interest, competition law, competition-restricting agreementsReferences
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Kazimierz Wielki University https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2753-8866
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