Private pension funds in Romania broke EU competition rules

The Court of Justice of the European Union has confirmed that private pension funds in Romania infringed EU competition rules. The decision comes to support the Romanian Competition Council’s findings after an investigation carried out in 2010. The Competition Council fined 14 local companies that took part in an anti-competition agreement on the mandatory pension funds market with EUR 1.22 million. The agreement referred to so-called “duplicates”, namely participants who registered with two accession acts at different pension funds, during the initial period of acceding to private pension funds. The law stated that these people should have been randomly distributed, but instead the pension managers had deals to divide these potential clients between them, thus breaking competition rules. The 14 companies challenged the Competition Council’s decision and Romania’s High Court asked the European Court of Justice for an opinion on this matter. editor@romania-insider.com