Taiwan Fair Trade Act Amended to Allow Establishment of Anti-Trust Fund

The amendment to Taiwan Fair Trade Act passed its third reading at the Legislative Yuan that allows competent authorities to set up an anti-trust fund to strengthen the investigation and punishment on concerted action and promote the sound development of market competition and order as added in Article 47-1 of the Act. 

According to the Taiwan Fair Trade Commission’s news release (Taiwan FTC), the legislators’ proposing this amendment to add Article 47-1 actually enhances Taiwan FTC’s law enforcement.  The financial sources of the fund will come from 30% of the administrative fines paid for Fair Trade Act violation.  Also in view of concerted action usually being conducted covertly and hard to detect, insiders are more likely to have access to relevant information of such collusion activities.  Thus, the fund will also be used as reward money to insiders or other whistleblowers who provide information on collusion to competent authorities. 

With addition of Article 47-1 to the Fair Trade Act, the Taiwan FTC is authorized to formulate details regulating the applicability of reward money, qualification of information providers, standard and procedure of giving reward money, cancelation, annulment, and recovery of reward money, and confidentiality of the information provider’s identity.  To effectively implement the establishment of the anti-trust fund and the reward money mechanism, the Taiwan FTC has taken the legislation of Korea and the UK and other domestic reward money mechanisms as reference to draft related supporting laws so as to formulate a package of supporting regulations and measures.  (June 2015)
/CCS