SAUDI ARABIA Law and Practice Contributed by: Alex Saleh, Asad Ahmad, Khaled al-Khashab and Shahad Al-Humaidani, GLA & Company
5. Decision: Prohibitions and Remedies 5.1 Authorities’ Ability to Prohibit or Interfere With Transactions To the extent the transaction creates an eco - nomic concentration that sufficiently impacts the Saudi Arabian market, the board of the GAC has the authority to reject the notification filing and block the transaction from taking place or require the transaction to proceed on specific conditions. The GAC has this authority under the KSA Competition Law and the Executive Regu - lations. 5.2 Parties’ Ability to Negotiate Remedies The parties may propose structural or behav - ioural remedies. In most cases, remedies are proposed by the economic concentration parties, at their discre - tion, as a means of permitting a transaction to be approved subject to conditions rather than the transaction being blocked altogether. In princi - ple, the structure and content of the remedies offered to the GAC will therefore be a matter for the party offering the remedies. However, the GAC will only accept remedies as conditions if it is satisfied that they address the GAC’s competition concerns to a sufficient degree to allow the GAC to approve the transac - tion subject to those conditions. The GAC will generally provide detailed feedback on the form and content of remedies proposed by the par - ties, including regarding whether the GAC would be satisfied that they would alleviate the com - petition concerns sufficiently, and, if not, what amendments to the proposed remedies would be required for the GAC to accept them.
higher quality goods or services. In this case the conclusion may be that the economic concen - tration may not substantially reduce competition. For the GAC to take efficiency claims into account in its assessment of an economic con - centration and to be in a position to reach the conclusion that, as a result of efficiencies, the economic concentration is unlikely to substan - tially reduce competition, the efficiencies have to: • benefit consumers; • be specific to the economic concentration; and • be verifiable. All of these conditions must be satisfied for the GAC to consider efficiencies in the context of its competitive assessment of economic concen - trations. 4.6 Non-Competition Issues There is no express limitation or permission on what the GAC can take into account to achieve the objectives of the KSA Competition Law and the Executive Regulations. It is worth noting that Saudi Arabia has a foreign investments law which seems to be separate from the KSA Competition Law. 4.7 Special Consideration for Joint Ventures See 2.10 Joint Ventures .
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