On May 18th, Resolution 905 of the Secretariat of Commerce of the Ministry of Economy was published in the Official Gazette. The resolution approves the new "Regulation for Merger Notification".
The new regulation is applicable to all acts of concentration that are notified for authorisation in accordance with Chapter III of Act 27.442 on the Defence of Competition (LDC).
Although the changes are multiple with respect to the provisions of the previous Resolution, the most significant one is the formal introduction of the simplified procedure provided for in Section 10 of the LDC.
The LDC entrusts the enforcement authority with the implementation of a procedural path called "summary procedure" ("PROSUM"), which will be applicable to those mergers that are less likely to have significant negative effects on competition. The implementation of the summary procedure has led to the creation of form F0.
Another point that stands out is the incorporation of a pre-notification instance, designed as a voluntary stage in which companies may contact the National Commission for the Defence of Competition (CNDC, for its acronym in Spanish) staff to clarify specific doubts about a merger they plan to notify.
The national antitrust community agreed on the need to modernise the regulation of the procedure for notifying acts of economic concentration, both to adapt it to the provisions of the LDC -sanctioned in 2018- and to incorporate the experience accumulated by the CNDC in more than 20 years of merger control in Argentina.
The regulation issued by the Secretariat of Commerce is the result of a long process of work by the CNDC, which included a public consultation with input from various competition agencies, local and international organisations, and various local and international antitrust experts.
Resolution 905/2023 is available in the following link.