ICC Follows Up Information of The State-Owned Enterprises Minister on The Alleged Medical Device ‘Mafia’.

Indonesia Competition Commission (ICC) will write to the Ministry of State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) to obtain further information on the existence of the medical device mafia in Indonesia especially in delving deeply into if there is a potential cartel being perpetrated by business actors in the field of health to arrange the production and supply of medical devices in Indonesia. If the existences of cartel or other infringements in such medical devices are indeed proven, then ICC will not hesitate to impose maximum sanctions on business actors taking advantage of earning profits as larger as possible during the national disaster emergency of this Covid-19.

As we are aware of, the Minister of State-Owned Enterprises in the last few years underscored the existence of the alleged mafia practices of medical devices which all this time has been spurring Indonesia to further choose importing medical devices rather than producing them domestically. This has been indicated by the high import of Indonesia for these medical devices, one of which is ventilator. If the utterance on the medical device Mafia constitutes a form of behavior in violation of the Law regarding The Prohibition of Monopolistic Practices and Unfair Business Competition, then, such information is surely valuable for ICC in carrying out its competition law supervision duties. Cooperation in terms of providing data, information, and evidence constitutes support for ICC in carrying out such task.

Spokesperson of ICC, Guntur S. Saragih, said that the health sector has become the priority of supervision at ICC since the last few years, so that it has conducted various law enforcement actions in that field. It has been informed that various violations taking place in such field include the drug price fixing as well as conspiracy and collusion in the procurement of medical devices and hospital construction.