Lebanese Republic 
Minister activities date 21-11-2019
Minister of Economy and Trade Mansour Bteish submitted to the Council of Ministers’ General Secretariat the draft law aiming to organize the competition, namely after the Council of Ministers had agreed, on August 29th 2019, on the request of Minister Bteish to retrieve the draft law referred to the Parliament in 2007 in order to update it.
The new draft law, which falls under the financial and economic reforms undertaken by the Government in its reform and corrective process, aims to set rules strengthening competition within the Lebanese markets and limit from monopolistic trading practices in breach of competition. Moreover, this law gives a push to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) and the pioneering projects based on the principle of innovation and regeneration, thus contributing to increase the productivity level of the national economy and ensure the consumer welfare.
In this regard, the Ministry of Economy & Trade took into consideration the remarks of the ESCWA, UNCTAD and OECD when elaborating the draft law in line with developments regarding the competition legislations witnessed during last years on the regional and international levels. However, the Ministry gave great attention to the protection of the consumer rights for it is considered the weakest part in the mutual trading transactions, by diversifying offers, leveraging the goods and services’ quality as well as reducing prices to level them from the cost of production by encouraging competition and enforcing this new law within the freedom of prices.
To this end, the compelling reasons of the competition draft law state that “Lebanon ranking according to the Global Competitiveness Index (report made by the World Economic Forum) came at 120 out of 137 countries according to the anti-monopoly policy index and 63 out of 137 according to the market dominance index for the period between 2017 and 2018; the thing that clearly reveals that the competition level in Lebanon is low.” In addition, “the lebanese market suffers from a weak economic structure due to its small size from one hand; and due to the large number of franchises and monopolies granted to public and private persons in most of the economic and services sectors, on the other hand.”
Furthermore, the competition draft law emphasizes that “achieving growth in the national economy requires the launching of a streamlining unproductive public spending and focusing on investment spending as well as addressing all complicity processes and courtesy offers in terms of public procurement; the thing that may be achieved pursuant to the competition draft law.” In addition, the said draft law highlights “the needs of the national economy and its specifities whereof all its provisions aim to assure markets public balance and enshrine the competition freedom through undermining anti-competitive trading practices; especially the agreements, complicity processes, abuse of market dominance positions in addition to practicing a prior and backup censorship on the economic focus operations in different markets (mergers and acquisitions).
