COMPETITION COUNCIL STRENGTHENS PARTNERSHIP WITH MUNICIPALITIES

On October 24, Jūratė Šovienė, the Deputy Chairperson of the Competition Council (the Council) met the members of the Association of Local Authorities in Lithuania.

“One of the fields of our activity is advocacy of competition culture. Our long-term goal is to reinforce the partnership based on mutual trust between the Council and business community as well as public administration bodies,” – says Jūratė Šovienė.

The aforementioned meeting is an initiative launched by the Council continuing a series of seminars for public administration bodies. During the seminars held in municipalities the Council’s experts present the Guidelines for Assessing Impact of Draft Decisions to Competition (the Guidelines) and the Council’s activities covering competition and public administration.

The Guidelines explain how not to distort competition and ensure equal treatment of all market participants in various economic fields when drafting legal acts. The assessment of draft decisions adopted by public administration bodies with regard to their impact on competition is of great relevance in many sectors of economy but especially when providing services of transportation, waste management, heating and administration of multi-storeyed dwelling houses.

Together with the Guidelines, the Council’s experts prepared a short questionnaire that should help to promptly assess an impact which a draft decision is likely to have on competition.

Examples taken from the Council’s practice and included into the Guidelines will hopefully facilitate decision making as well as legislative drafting processes and, thus, will prevent from restricting competition.

The Council aims to ensure that all public administration bodies create sufficient conditions for competition and act in favour of fair competition.

On September 26, the Guidelines were presented to the employees of Kaunas City Municipality and Kaunas District Municipality, on October 7 - to the employees of Vilnius District Municipality. The seminars will be further continued upon requests from municipalities.

Communication Division