guia prático do cade - Conselho Administrativo de Defesa Econômica

Rio–São Paulo route increased simultaneously by 10%. Based on this, SEAE (Secretariatfor Economic Monitoring) filed a petition against these companies.This Administrative Proceeding was filed on March 28, 2000, based on PreliminaryInvestigation being processed by the Secretariat for Economic Law (SDE) andon the Petition presented by SEAE. The objective of the investigations was to investigatea possible cartel formed by some of the Represented by virtue of practice ofsimultaneous increases in the prices of air tickets in 1999.The Administrative Proceeding was filed against the defendant airlines andtheir administrators, with the objective to investigate conduct likely to fall withinitems I, II and XXIV, of Law N o 8.884/94, which typify the violations defined inarticle 20, I, II and IV.Relevant Markets Affected by the PracticeThe conduct was adopted to make the reduction of discounts in the tickets forthe shuttle service Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo, between Santos Dumont (Rio) andCongonhas (SP) airports viable and thus the relevant and geographic market ofthe product was defined as that of the market of air transport services route SantosDumont/Congonhas.Configuration of Anticompetitive ConductSEAE’s investigation concluded that a change in price was not merely a case ofconscious parallelism. In addition to a meeting of the companies’ executives, evidenceshowed that tariff information was exchanged by the companies by postingon the ATPCO system, the system of airline tariff data maintained by Airline TariffPublishing Company. A company could enter a notice of change in tariff so that foran initial period of three days, the change could be seen only by the other airlinecompanies and not by consumers or by travel agencies. The company notifying thechange could then revert, if the competitors did not follow it.This feature of the ATPCO system had been contested before by the Departmentof Justice of the USA, but the changes in the system as a result of this casewere implemented only in the United States.DecisionIn September 2004, CADE ruled that the four companies were in collusion toCADE PRACTICAL GUIDE183