Consumer Protection Agency fines companies for antitrust arrangement in selling cinema tickets
The Agency also said it had carried out eight investigations over the previous year, which included potential abuses of dominant market positions, unfair competition, coordinated practices and possible restriction of competition by state administrative agencies. Photo: Nino Alavidze/Agenda.ge
Tweet 
Share
The Competition and Consumer Protection Agency of Georgia on Tuesday announced it had fined three companies ₾1.6 million ($595,954) for an arrangement that granted exclusive rights to selling cinema tickets online in violation of competition law.
The Agency said its investigation into the online movie ticket market had revealed Distribution Company and Tinet had made an exclusive contract which granted the latter sole rights to sell movie tickets on its website tkt.ge.
The two entities were fined alongside El-tickets, the complainant in the case, which was found to have attempted to obtain the exclusive rights for their portal biletebi.ge.
Distribution Company, which operates a number of cinema theatres and screening spaces, was fined ₾1.12 million ($417,168), with Tinet issued a ₾544,328 ($202,746) penalty, and El-tickets ordered to pay ₾5,368 ($1,999).
The body said the court had also suspended Distribution Company's exclusive conditions for sale of tickets, and noted the companies were instructed to bring the agreement into compliance with the competition legislation.
It added it was issuing mandatory recommendations for enhancing online sales of tickets for cultural, entertainment, creative, sports, leisure and tourism events, as well as educational, transport-related and other products and services that incorporated “public, open and accessible competitive circumstances”.
The Agency also said it had carried out eight investigations over the previous year, which included potential abuses of dominant market positions, unfair competition, coordinated practices and possible restriction of competition by state administrative agencies.
Georgian Health Minister Zurab Azarashvili on Monday said the Ministry was ensuring “daily” monitoring of oncological and other medical drugs in the domestic pharmaceutical market, following the National Competition Agency’s fining of pharmacy networks last month for price-fixing.
The Competition and Consumer Protection Agency of Georgia on Monday said it had received 578 complaints on violations of consumer rights between November 2022 and January 2024 and opened cases on 340 of the submissions.
The Georgian National Competition Agency on Friday announced it had fined four pharmaceutical companies ₾53 million ($19 mln) for price-fixing on oncology medicines funded within the state programme.
Irakli Lekvinadze, the Chairman of the National Competition Agency of Georgia, on Tuesday said enforcement of competition and consumer rights protection policies in the country was “becoming stronger”.
The Georgian National Competition Agency on Monday said it had launched investigations on 285 issues related to protection of consumer rights out of 509 complaints it had received between November 2022 and March 2023.
Projects implemented by the Communications Commission of Georgia for protecting rights of consumers and developing media literacy were introduced by the body’s member Vakhtang Abashidze to the audience of the international conference on Competition and Consumer Protection in Tbilisi on Thursday, the state body said.
The Georgian Competition and Consumer Agency on Tuesday said 18,138 concentrations of economic agents had been registered in the country in the fourth quarter of 2023.
The State Procurement Agency of Georgia on Wednesday said it had blacklisted 16 companies in the first three weeks of 2024 due to their failure to fulfil obligations under contracts on state procurement.
The number of consumer claims against commercial banks operating in Georgia decreased by 1.9 percent year-on-year in 2023, with the figure reduced to 22,794, the National Bank said in its latest update of the figures.