THE Moscow Arbitration Court of Appeal has adopted the settlement agreement in an anti-trust litigation between the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service of Russia (FAS) and Container Terminal Saint-Petersburg (CTSP) that is owned by Russian transportation group UCL Holding
THE Moscow Arbitration Court of Appeal has adopted the settlement agreement in an anti-trust litigation between the Federal Anti-Monopoly Service of Russia (FAS) and Container Terminal Saint-Petersburg (CTSP) that is owned by Russian transportation group UCL Holding. FAS has admitted that the container handling tariff rates of CTSP are economically justified and their growth happened due to a sharp rise in the US dollar exchange rate, as the terminal's commercial policy was based on that currency, reported Port.Today, Malaga, Spain.
In its turn, CTSP has presented a roadmap of the process of changing its tariff to be denominated in Russian ruble and has committed to raise the share of ruble transactions in the company's earnings by the end of this year.
In the framework of the settlement agreement, FAS accepted CTSP's activity as destined to provide a fair competition within the Russian port of St Petersburg.
As reported by Port.Today a year ago, several large terminal operators in Russia were accused by FAS of abusing their monopoly power and charging excessive container handling rates. Many of them were fined. St Petersburg First Container Terminal was fined RUR4.17 billion (US$69.5 million) and Petrolesport - RUR1.27 billion.
Later, in December 2017, the Moscow Arbitration Court approved the settlement agreement between FAS and these stevedoring companies (both of them are part of Global Ports), on condition that the terminals would convert their handling rates into rubles.
However, the fine for CTSP was not determined at that time. Only recently, on May 31, FAS announced it - Russia's largest container terminal has to pay RUR91.2 million into the federal budget. UCL Holding strongly disagreed with the FAS decision, stressing that CTSP is not dominating the container stevedoring market, on the contrary it operates in a highly competitive environment.
All these charges and fines of FAS were aimed solely on stimulating Russian terminal operators to change their tariffs into rubles, as was ordered by President Vladimir Putin. The Russian parliament on June 14 adopted the draft law obliging Russian ports denominate their service rates in Russian rubles.
