A defesa da concorrência diante de atos de concentração durante o período da pandemia da COVID-19 no Brasil

Abstract

The pandemic caused by the coronavirus has had an impact on various sectors of the world economy, causing an economic and financial crisis that has led the state to intervene to mitigate the effects of the crisis both for companies, impacted by the shortage of raw materials and social distancing, and for consumers. Given this scenario, Law No. 14,010/2020 was enacted, dealing with the special and transitional legal regime, establishing, among other provisions, flexibility in the control of acts of concentration of economic agents tending to form consortia, associative contracts and joint ventures, removing the effectiveness of the legal provision that provided for prior notification of these acts to Cade. The aim of this study is to analyze the impacts of these legislative flexibilities on merger control during the pandemic, as well as CADE's actions. The research is exploratory, with doctrinal and documentary analysis. The method will be predominantly inductive when analyzing the votes of the concentration acts of business companies, quantitative when analyzing the data on the number of concentrations during the research period and deductive-descriptive when exploring socio-history. After analyzing the data obtained, it was found that during the pandemic there was a progressive increase in the number of mergers and association agreements, however, such flexibilizations did not cause negative effects on CADE's control of mergers.