Lisa Phelan spoke to Law360 about the Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission’s announcement of the signing of an antitrust cooperation framework with their enforcer peers in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom that the agencies billed as the foundation for bilateral information-sharing agreements.
The enforcers already had a history of cooperation, according to Lisa, who noted that the six agencies involved come from five countries with similar antitrust approaches that include criminal penalties for price-fixing and similar cartels. She says that this similarity makes it easier to share information legally, but added that until the framework is used to pen specific bilateral arrangements with legally-binding pathways, it remains “kind of aspirational.”