| At the tenth fish auction, the organizers discovered price collusion The tenth auction for the sale of quotas for catching aquatic biological resources, held on Friday at the European-Asian Exchange, introduced some variety into the already familiar procedure for distributing quotas. The interdepartmental commission saw price collusion in the actions of the participants.
In total, 67 Russian companies took part in the auction. It was proposed to sell 957 lots, but there were buyers for only 147. Budget revenues from the auction will amount to 975.775 million rubles. This is 1.3 times the starting price.
The most popular product, as expected, was crabs. Prices changed chaotically and were hardly logical. The first lot "sold" at the starting price - 7.830 million rubles, the second - for 8.300 million. Then the price went up sharply, sometimes increasing threefold. For one of the lots of Kamchatka crab in the Western Kamchatka subzone, fishermen bargained so desperately that after the hammer hit they began to applaud. As a result, the lot “sold” at a price almost four times higher than the starting price - 13.6 million versus 4.698 million.
The auction organizers say that most likely its participants agreed in advance not to interfere with each other in buying the desired lots at the starting price. Sources close to the commission even claim that they themselves saw the process of “registration” for the required lots. It is collusion that explains the minimum price of the first two lots. However, companies that were not part of the conspiracy then likely came into play. With their unexpected behavior they inflated the price.
“There was probably an agreement between the bidders,” says a member of the interdepartmental commission. Nevertheless, the fishermen themselves deny the existence of any preliminary agreements. But the version of collusion is partly confirmed by the fact that bidders were not given complete lists of the lots on offer, as was done at all previous auctions. In addition, the order of fishing subzones was changed. Fishermen call this “cheap tricks designed to confuse bidders and force them to buy the lots that the commission wants.”
The organizers of the auction say that they only wanted to prevent the fishermen from making further moves: “At one of the previous auctions, when Kamchatka crab was sold, we observed obvious price collusion between the companies. To prevent this, the commission asked the participants not to give out lists of lots and to mix up the subzones. This was a collegial decision, and it did not contradict the law,” Elena Maslennikova, head of the agro-industrial complex department of the Ministry of Economic Development, told the Vremya Novostei newspaper. “As a result, today there was no unity between the participants, the price changed chaotically and unexpectedly - it seems that they could not agree,” says the chairman of the auction commission, Deputy Minister of the MAP Konstantin Parmenenkov.
As a result of this nervous trade, no buyers were found for 19 lots of Kamchatka crab. Of the remaining lots, we managed to successfully sell herring from the Karaginskaya subzone - prices for it were on average twice the starting price. The remaining types of biological resources - saury, tuna and likodas - were not popular: fishermen bought several lots at the starting price or with a slight excess. Unsold lots will be put up for the last auction of this season on July 13, where foreigners will also be admitted. Anfisa VORONINA |
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