Late Payment Registries and Competition Law (in Spanish)

Abstract

This article analyzes the features of debt and late payment registries as an instrument of information exchange among companies from the perspective of antitrust laws. Since 1992 the Spanish Competition Tribunal has issued more than 300 resolutions dealing with the business agreements to share information regarding late payments and credit (credit bureaus), building a solid doctrinal view providing an individual antitrust exception to this agreements. More than half the individual antitrust exception resolutions from 1992 to 2006 refer to credit bureaus and late payment information registries. Regulation 602/2006 compiles and summarizes the Competition Tribunal doctrine and provides a general antitrust exemption aimed at lessening the Tribunal from the burden of having to examine and approve most of these potentially restrictive agreements if they fulfill certain conditions. This article analyzes and critically assesses the requirements imposed and questions the necessity and usefulness of the new regulatory antitrust exemption within the European antitrust authorities doctrine regarding the anticompetitive character of information sharing agreements, recently recalled by the European Court of Justice Judgment of 23 november 2006 (Asnef/Equifax).

Note: Downloadable document is in Spanish.

Keywords: late payment, information sharing, collusion, anticompetitive agreement, exemption, credit bureaus, late payment bureaus