Andrej Matvoz, Director of Slovenian Competition Protection Agency (SCPA), is currently attending the 74th annual spring meeting of experts in the field of antitrust/competition legislation, consumer protection and data protection, which is being prepared by the American Bar Association (ABA) and is taking place in Washington. At the meeting, the SCPA Director also presented the challenges that the SCPA faces in its work, in particular the lack of SCPA's legal remedy against court decisions: "At SCPA, we are trying to gain the support of the courts for our decisions, despite the high evidentiary requirements and the 'unusual' inability to appeal or otherwise provide appropriate legal remedy against court decisions, especially in the event that the court overturns the SCPA's decision and returns the case to the latter for reconsideration. We have also asked the European Commission for help, all with the aim of ensuring the effective and uniform application of European Union law.”
He further emphasized, “that the administrative court, which decides on appeals against SCPA decisions, even requested proof from SCPA that the cartel had negative effects, which is by its very nature a restriction by object, and that the court routinely finds errors in SCPA's decisions.” “They just send it back to us, with instructions on how to do it... and we have no appeal against this decision, so we have to start over,” and “In one cartel case, we had evidence, we had a confession, because the applicant under the leniency program actually described the infringement and admitted its existence and participation in the infringement, but even with this evidence we could not win,” as Andrej Matvoz pointed out in the conclusion of his speech.
The above-mentioned speech by Andrej Matvoz was also covered by the American web portal MLex, which specializes, among other things, in reporting on competition law legislation and practice, as well as important events in the field of competition law.