The legal regime of competition in United Kingdom

The United Kingdom has recently introduced a unitary competition regime. Begining with 1979, the United Kingdom was a primary exponent of the neoliberal philosophy, putting in first place market, privatisation, liberalisation and deregulation. For that reason, a competition policy did not exist too much in practice for almost two decades. An important aspect was the influence of European Union competition law. Even in a such situation, the supranational policy could not take the place in of a domestic competition policy. The British Parliament adopted some rules in 1998 in the field of anti-competitive agreements and the control of abuse of dominance and in 2002 in the field of merger control. In March 2012, there were announced the proposals for the reformation the United Kingdom competition law regime. According to the proposals, the functions of the Competition Commission and the competition functions of the Office of Fair Trading (OFT), will be the competences of a new, single competition authority, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The new body will have jurisdiction to analyse merger control reviews and market investigations, and in the same time will act as the main institution enforcing the competition laws.