Federal Act
on Cartels and other
Restraints of Competition
(Cartel Act, CartA)

¹ Agree­ments that sig­ni­fic­antly re­strict com­pet­i­tion in a mar­ket for spe­cif­ic goods or ser­vices and are not jus­ti­fied on grounds of eco­nom­ic ef­fi­ciency, and all agree­ments that elim­in­ate ef­fect­ive com­pet­i­tion are un­law­ful.

² Agree­ments af­fect­ing com­pet­i­tion are deemed to be jus­ti­fied on grounds of eco­nom­ic ef­fi­ciency if:

a.

they are ne­ces­sary in or­der to re­duce pro­duc­tion or dis­tri­bu­tion costs, im­prove products or pro­duc­tion pro­cesses, pro­mote re­search in­to or dis­sem­in­a­tion of tech­nic­al or pro­fes­sion­al know-how, or ex­ploit re­sources more ra­tion­ally; and

b.

they will un­der no cir­cum­stances en­able the parties in­volved to elim­in­ate ef­fect­ive com­pet­i­tion.

³ The fol­low­ing agree­ments between ac­tu­al or po­ten­tial com­pet­it­ors are pre­sumed to lead to the elim­in­a­tion of ef­fect­ive com­pet­i­tion:

a.

agree­ments to dir­ectly or in­dir­ectly fix prices;

b.

agree­ments to lim­it the quant­it­ies of goods or ser­vices to be pro­duced, pur­chased or sup­plied;

c.

agree­ments to al­loc­ate mar­kets geo­graph­ic­ally or ac­cord­ing to trad­ing part­ners.

⁴ The elim­in­a­tion of ef­fect­ive com­pet­i­tion is also pre­sumed in the case of agree­ments between un­der­tak­ings at dif­fer­ent levels of the pro­duc­tion and dis­tri­bu­tion chain re­gard­ing fixed or min­im­um prices, and in the case of agree­ments con­tained in dis­tri­bu­tion con­tracts re­gard­ing the al­loc­a­tion of ter­rit­or­ies to the ex­tent that sales by oth­er dis­trib­ut­ors in­to these ter­rit­or­ies are not per­mit­ted.¹¹