On 8 March 2013, the results of the Inquiry entitled “Enhanced Effectiveness of Competition Law Enforcement” were presented to the Swedish Government. This follows the launch by the Swedish Government of an inquiry into certain aspects of the Swedish legislation governing the enforcement powers of the Swedish Competition Authority (SCA) on 26 April 2012. The remit of the inquiry was to review part of the legislation that applies to the activities of the SCA with the purpose of making enforcement in the area of competition law more effective.  (the word ‘inquiry’ means investigation and does not relate to the group of people actually carrying out the inquiry)

The results and proposals of the inquiry are as follows:

*The SCA should be able to order a suspension of its merger investigations. This could be applied when notifying parties have not complied with a request to provide information requested by the Authority to conduct the relevant analysis. It is therefore proposed to introduce a provision in the Competition Act enabling the SCA to “stop the clock” during merger investigations.

*A marker system should be introduced in the Swedish leniency program. A marker system gives undertakings time to collect evidence and complete an application without risking that another undertaking would complete its application first. It is envisaged that the introduction of a marker system would lead to higher quality applications, which would facilitate further investigation by the SCA.

*It often takes several weeks to search through digital material copied during an inspection. The SCA has therefore in many cases chosen to make forensic copies of the material and then conduct indexing and searching of the material at its premises. This procedure has previously not been specifically regulated in the Competition Act. It is thus proposed to expressly regulate the SCA’s working procedure by allowing it to bring the material to its own premises.

*The Inquiry was also aimed at ascertaining whether the need for companies to cooperate with the SCA in the context of inspections is adequately provided for by the current legislation. The inquiry concluded that even though the Competition Act does not contain any explicit requirement for undertakings to cooperate, the obligation can be considered to be implicit in the Act.

The results of the inquiry are published in Swedish (including an English summary) on the Swedish Government Offices webpage:   http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/108/a/211081