Seminar Eradicating Cartel Practices in Indonesia: The Challenges of Indirect Evidence

On Friday, January 20, 2012, Universitas Pelita Harapan (UPH) Faculty of Law held a national seminar entitled ?Eradicating Cartel Practices in Indonesia: The Challenges of Indirect Evidence.? The seminar featured Dr. jur. Udin Silalahi, SH.,LLM (UPH), Prof. Dr. Ine S. Ruki (LPEM-FEUI), Dr. Anna Maria Tri Anggraini, SH.,MH (KPPU), Mr. HMBC Rikrik Rizkiyana,SH, and Dr. Sutrisno Iwantono (KADIN) with Keynote Speech by Ir. Muhammad Nawir Messi, MSc., Chairman of Commission for the Supervision of Business Competition (KPPU). The event was attended by UPH students and lecturers, law practitioners, and representatives from law firms.

Cartel is defined as a formal agreement among firms in an oligopolistic industry. Rizkiyana explained that cartel members may agree on such matters as prices, total industry output, market shares, allocation of customers, allocation of territories, bid-rigging, establishment of common sales agencies, and the division of profits or combination of these. Cartel in this broad sense is synonymous with ?explicit? forms of collusion.

Silalahi mentioned that cartel practices are hard to be detected as it happened in oligopolistic industry. In investigation, there are two kinds of evidence; direct evidence and indirect one. Direct evidence of an agreement is that which identifies a meeting or communication between the subjects and describes the substance of their agreement. Circumstantial evidence does not specifically describe the terms of an agreement or the parties to it. It includes evidence of communications among suspected cartel operators and economic evidence concerning the market and the conduct of those participating in it that suggest concerted action.

While Anggraini described indirect evidence by defining the elements of cartel. There are several elements of cartel; the business practitioner, the agreement, the competitor, the same market, the regulated price, the restriction of supply, the division of area, and it causes monopolistic practice or unfair business competition. (dee)

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