Cartel is the common concept which refers to anti-competitive agreements and/or concerted practices among competitors including price fixing, market allocation, restriction of supply or imposing quotas and collusive bidding in tenders. Cartels, which are accepted as the most severe competition restriction, strive to increase their profits by controlling different market related variables including, especially, price and quantity.

Agreement among competing undertakings to determine competitive parameters in the market leads to the disfunctioning of the market mechanism whose efficient functioning maximizes consumer welfare, and thus to prices artificially settling above competitive equilibrium. Such an agreement reduces the pressure on undertakings to produce cheaper, better quality or new products in order to reach more consumers and condemns consumers to higher prices and lower quality products. At the same time, cartels lead to negative effects on the fight with inflation and on the equality of income distribution. Hence, cartels have been described as the “cancer of market economy”, and it has also been stated that “no economy that has no effective and deterrent sanctions against cartels can be claimed to be a free economy.” 

Due to the severe damage they do to economy, there is a world-wide consensus among competition authorities that cartels should be treated differently than other practices restricting competition and should be punished in the most severe manner. The most common type of sanction used in this struggle is fines. Many countries apply severe fines to deter the formation of cartels. However, the fight against cartels is not limited to fines imposed on undertakings; administrative fines have also been supported with other sanctions such as fines imposed on executives with decisive roles in the formation of cartels, imposing jail sentence, and loaded damages payments under private law. 

One of the most effective methods competition authorities utilize in the fight against cartels is “leniency programs”. Through leniency programs, detecting cartels – which by nature operate in secret – is facilitated, and the first undertaking to disclose the cartel and its employees are granted immunity against all penal sanctions. Furthermore, other undertakings and their employees which assist in the cartel investigation avail discounts on their penalties at varying rates. Regulations concerning the leniency program were introduced with the amendments to the Act no 4054 adopted in 2008. Within this framework, the Regulation on Active Cooperation for Detecting Cartels (Leniency Regulation) and the Regulation on Fines to Apply in Cases of Agreements, Concerted Practices and Decisions Limiting Competition, and Abuse of Dominant Position (Regulation on Fines) concerning the detection of cartels were put into force as of February 15, 2009.