Newsletter
PROPOSED AMENDMENTS TO FAIR TRADE ACT
The Fair Trade Commission has proposed cer-tain amendments to the Fair Trade Act with the following key features:
‧In line with government restructuring, the name of the competent authority for the Act will be changed to the "National Fair Trade Commission" (NFTC).
‧The types of actions constituting "restraint of competition" and "unfair competition" will be expanded. For the former, in addition to monopolies, business combinations and con-certed actions, they will also include resale price agreements and other actions likely to restrain competition. For the latter, actions of unfair competition will be reduced to cover only counterfeiting of symbols or famous for-eign trademarks, false or misleading state-ments or representations, denigration of commercial reputation, and other deceptive or obviously unfair conducts.
‧The threshold for monopoly will be raised, so that an enterprise with a total sales turnover of less than NT$2 billion will not be considered a monopolist.
‧An enterprise that establishes a 100%-owned subsidiary will be expressly exempted from the obligation to file a combination notifica-tion.
‧The regulation of concerted actions will be adjusted, with the introduction of a new catch-all provision for the granting of excep-tional permissions, and the adoption of a "le-niency" policy whereby an enterprise partici-pating in a concerted action may be subject to reduced administrative penalties or exempted from penalties if on its own initiative, it in-forms the NFTC of the unlawful concerted action before the NFTC has become aware of it or before it has begun to conduct investiga-tions; or if during an investigation the enter-prise assists in the investigation and provides specific evidence, so that the NFTC is able to successfully complete its investigation.
‧Actions to restrict resale pricing will in prin-ciple be unlawful per se.
‧The provisions regulating infringement of trade secrets is to be removed from the Act, and will be entirely governed by the Trade Secrets Act.
‧The sections that duplicate the provisions of the Commodity Labeling Act will be deleted.
‧The scope of restrictions on access to case files will be revised.
‧The criminal penalties relating to counterfeit-ing of famous foreign trademarks not regis-tered in Taiwan will be abolished.
‧There will be greater differentiation between penalties, with different administrative penal-ties defined for different types of violation of the Act, and the maximum levels of fines will be greatly increased, up to a maximum of NT$1 billion.
‧A party that does not accept an NFTC decision should proceed directly to administrative liti-gation.
In addition, in conjunction with the separate legislative process to enact the Multilevel Sales Control Act, the sections of the FTA relevant to multilevel sales are deleted from the draft. The draft amendments to the FTA and the draft Mul-tilevel Sales Control Act have both been sub-mitted to the Executive Yuan for approval, after which they will be sent to the Legislative Yuan for consideration.