The Chairman of the Ukraine Antimonopoly Committee, Dr. Vyssel Tshonko, has submitted to UNCTAD Secretary-General Supachai Panitchpakdi a formal request for a peer review of Ukraine's competition law and policy.
The Peer Review will be conducted during the plenary sessions of the UNCTAD Intergovernmental Group of Experts (IGE) on Competition Policy, to be held in Geneva in July 2013.
Ukraine is in the process of formulating a ten-year economic reform programme that will revamp its competition law and policy.
One of the principal objectives of the UNCTAD peer review will be to allow for an independent and objective assessment of the substantive content of the competition law and the experience gained so far with the enforcement of the law, as well as to highlight what more could be done to implement the structural changes envisaged in the proposed ten-year reform programme.
A peer review report is scheduled to be completed by early January 2013 for consideration at the IGE in July so that it will hopefully prove useful to this reform process to strengthen Ukraine’s competition regime.
Professor William E. Kovacic will lead the team to conduct the peer review report. Professor Kovacic is Global Competition Professor of Law and Policy at George Washington University and served as general counsel of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission from 2001 to 2004.
SECO, Switzerland, has kindly agreed to fund the UNCTAD peer review and the follow-up capacity building activities, which UNCTAD usually extends to peer reviewed countries for the implementation of the recommendations.
After July 2013, Ukraine will report regularly to the UNCTAD IGE on competition policy the impact of the peer review and those of the capacity building activities extended to it in the follow up to the recommendations.
UNCTAD’ s competition law and policy peer review programme was launched in 2005. So far 19 developing countries and countries with economies in transition have been peer reviewed at UNCTAD before senior competition officials, Ministers and senior policy makers, heads of regulatory agencies, and representatives of Consumer and Business groups from some 180 jurisdictions.
