Competition Law: The New Value of the Mobile Unit is Published

• enero 27, 2020
• admin

In compliance with the provisions of the Argentine Competition Act No. 27,442 (LDC), through Resolution of the Secretary of Internal Trade No. 13/2020 -RESOL-2020-13-APN-SCI # MDP- (Resolution 13/20), published today in the Official Gazette, the new value of the Mobile Unit (UM) was announced.

Section 85 of the LDC defined the UM as a unit of account and established its initial value at twenty Argentine Pesos (AR$ 20). The same Section 85 establishes that the value of the UM will be updated automatically every year, using the variation of the Consumer Price Index (CPI) published by the INSTITUTO NACIONAL DE ESTADÍSTICAS Y CENSOS (i.e., the NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF STATISTICS AND CENSUS, or INDEC for its Spanish acronym), a decentralized body of the MINISTRY OF ECONOMY.

The UM is used to define a series of values ​​established in various articles of the LDC. Mainly, the value of the UM is related to the determination of the thresholds for the notification of economic concentrations (eg., M&A transactions) before the competition authority (i.e., when they should be notified or when they would be exempted from doing so), notification or filing fees’ maximums and minimums that could be applied by said enforcement authority (which, up to the present date, has never been applied by the authority) and the amounts of the applicable fines under the LDC.

Resolution 13/20, considers that the variation between December 2018 and December 2019 of the CPI, general level, national total published by the INDEC has been 53.83%.

Consequently, applying said variation to the value of the UM that was in force for the year 2019 (which, up to date, was $ 26.40), it results that the value of the UM “for the year 2020 must be equal to forty pesos and sixty-one cents (AR$ 40.61).”