The Superintendence of Industry and Commerce, the sole authority for competition protection in Colombia, issued a Guide to Provide Orientation in the Implementation of Competition Compliance Programs. Although the Guide has a doctrinal scope and does not impose obligations, its publication allows the market to understand the vision that the SIC has on the relevance of these types of programs, the benefits of implementing them, and the key elements that they should contain and develop. In this way, the SIC highlights the value of these programs as a mechanism for the prevention and early detection of anticompetitive conduct.
On 18 January 2022, the Colombian Government enacted Law 2195 of 2022, which adopts measures for transparency and corruption prevention. These measures entail significant changes in relation to competition protection such as modifications to the fines applicable to individuals and companies and to the leniency program.
The Superintendence of Industry and Commerce (SIC) established the thresholds that will be taken into account to determine whether there is an obligation to undertake a merger control procedure during the year 20221. For this purpose, through Resolution No. 83304 of 22 December 2021, the SIC determined that those economic integrations whose participants, individually or jointly, have total assets or operating income equal to or greater than COP 57,322,387,083.44 (USD 14,398,413.292) must be subject of merger control.