There has been a somewhat startling demonstration of diverging views regarding interventionism in competition matters between emerging and established jurisdictions.

During the recent BRICS international competition conference, held in New Delhi over the last few days, FTC chairwoman Edith Ramirez had sought to steer emerging economies away from mixing industrial policy with antitrust law. She indicated that “proper goals of competition law were best solved when a competition authority is focused on competition effects and consumer welfare, and when its analysis is not “interrupted to meet social and political goals.” (Ramirez cited the well-known case of the Wal-Mart / Massmart merger during which a number of South African government departments had intervened and extracted significant non-competition centric conditions from the merging parties as an example of permitting non-competition factors to intervene in the merger-review process to an undue degree).

Juxtapose this with the comments made at the very same conference, by the newly appointed interim South African Competition Commissioner, Tembinkosi Bonakele. Bonakele had the following to say during an interview regarding the independence of the competition authorities in South Africa:

“In a country which suffers from 35 per cent unemployment, there are increasingly calls for the authority to consider job creation and the development of local industries in its investigation and merger reviews. This is not an unreasonable call. While competition authorities should not be beholden to the government neither can they be loose cannons who claim independence without accountability. Competition policy cannot exist in isolation and each BRICS enforcer faces the need to balance competition law with its government’s political and economic policies. Competition authorities cannot afford to shy away from the debate.”

A number of practitioners have keenly been awaiting Bonekele’s views on the independence of the Competition Commission in the light of the untimely and suspicious departure of the previous commissioner, Shan Ramburuth (in what many commentators have described as evidence of pure uninterrupted interventionism by the Department of Economic Development). It is, particularly, in light of the cloud surrounding (and possible political element involved in) his predecessor’s removal, that these comments of the South African competition commissioner are all the most startling. It is worrying that the prevalent view in developing economies (after all, the venue at issue here was a BRICS conference) appears to open the door for greater non-antitrust intervention rather than less government meddling.

It is certainly the view of the author of this piece — a presentation given this fall at the Inaugural Global Mergers Conference in Paris (Concurrences/Paul Hastings) — that the South African competition authority should rather seek to assert its independence rather than tolerate what appears to be an ever increasing amount of political interventionism.