SU, SUE
On 6 February 2002, the President promulgated an amendment to the Fair Trade Law (FTL). The amendment contains changes to bring the law into line with the Administrative Procedure Law, following the latter's entry into force, and turns the prior review system for mergers and acquisi-tions (please refer to the Focus).
Main points of the amendment other than those already covered in the Focus are as follows:
New provisions are introduced empowering the Fair Trade Commission (FTC) to attach conditions to an approval for a business com-bination, and defining the legal effects of a breach of such conditions (Article 12 Para-graph 2). In line with the change to a prior notification system, and in order to improve the regulatory system by providing the FTC with a flexible mechanism for dealing with the infinite variety of economic conditions that mergers and acquisitions involve in practice, the provisions empowering the regulatory authority to attach conditions for a reasonable period (previously contained in the FTL En-forcement Rules) have now been set forth in the FTL itself. Provisions are also introduced to define the legal effects of enterprises' failure to comply with such attached conditions.Certain provisions affecting citizens' rights and interests, previously contained in secondary regulation under the FTL, have now been moved into the law itself. In line with the relevant provisions of the Administrative Procedure Law, new provisions are also in-troduced concerning time limits for the FTC to process applications for exceptions to the re-strictions on concerted action, the types of conditions it may attach to such approval, and the revocation of approval. The scope of the authority's powers to make regulations gov-erning multi-level marketing is explicitly de-fined, and provisions are introduced to give interested parties the access to data and files, and to empower the authority to regulate such access.
