Legislation: Committee adopts controversial Competition Bill

A ‘B’ version of the Competition Amendment Bill will soon head to the National Assembly for a second reading debate and onward transmission to the NCOP, according to a media statement issued yesterday, reports Pam Saxby for Legalbrief Policy Watch.  As Legalbrief Today has already reported, the DA’s Michael Cardo walked out of a National Assembly Economic Development Committee meeting on Tuesday at which changes to the Bill were to have been adopted – leaving it without a quorum (Business Day). His decision to do so was prompted by committee chair Elsie Coleman’s insistence that he should not be permitted to pose any further questions to Economic Development Minister Ebrahim Patel.

Given that Parliament is officially in recess and that special permission was granted for the committee to meet to conclude its deliberations on the Bill, one cannot help but wonder where the other MPs were. In the absence of a quorum – one third of the number of MPS serving on a committee, as prescribed in National Assembly Rule 162(1) – ANC MPs not officially serving on the committee concerned are often called in simply to make up the number required to adopt a report or piece of legislation. This would not have been possible yesterday, with most MPs elsewhere in the country doing constituency work. Which does tend to point to deliberate absenteeism, in contravention of the rules.

In Cardo’s view, the Bill was ‘railroaded through the committee without proper interrogation’. ‘Only two days were set aside … to work clause-by-clause through a technically complex piece of legislation that could have far-reaching consequences,’ he said in a statement. As Legalbrief Today has regularly reported, once in force the proposed new statute (described by the Minister as ‘a new deal for economic transformation and inclusion’) is expected to ‘strengthen’ the Act’s public interest objectives, among other things by providing the competition authorities with the ‘tools to investigate and address high levels of economic concentration’ (eNCA).