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The European, Middle Eastern and African Antitrust Review 2020: Israel Overview 

Global Competition Review (GCR) published The European, Middle Eastern and African Antitrust Review 2020. The “Israel Overview” chapter was written by FBC’s Tal Eyal-Boger, Ziv Schwartz and Shani Brown.

The Economic Competition Law, 5748-1988 (the Law) is the primary law dealing with antitrust issues in Israel and its objective is to prevent harm to competition or the public. The Law contains the substantive rules that apply to the various restrictive trade practices (restrictive arrangements, mergers, monopolies, concerted groups and official importers).

In addition, the Law encompasses rules concerning the structure and the powers of the Israeli Competition Authority (ICA), the director general of the ICA (the Director General) and the Competition Tribunal (the Tribunal), as well as procedural rules that apply to cases brought before each of them.

Recent years have been characterised by trends for:

• strengthening the position of the ICA;
• increasing administrative enforcement, criminal enforcement as well as the focus of the ICA on its advisory capacity within the government; and
• increasing civil ‘follow-on’ class actions against international cartels.

On 1 January 2019, the Israeli parliament approved a significant amendment to the Law. The amendment created material and comprehensive revisions to the language of the Law, including to key provisions related to the Israeli monopoly control regime, the Israeli merger control regime, the enforcement mechanisms of the Law, and more as will be detailed below. Also, the amended Law encompasses an overall terminological change: the term ‘restrictive trade practices’ was changed to the term ‘competition’. Thus, inter alia, the Law became known as the Economic Competition Law instead of the Restrictive Trade Practices Law as it was before.

Please find a PDF copy of the Israel Overview here