Japan’s new competition chief Furuya likely to see eye-to-eye with Prime Minister Suga

MLex Market Insight

News

4.9 • 9 Ratings

🗓️ 18 September 2020

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Two recent developments in Japan are likely to have a significant impact on the country’s regulatory landscape. Firstly, the influential chairman of the Japan Fair Trade Commission, Kazuyuki Sugimoto, stepped down from his role to make way for his successor, Kazuyuki Furuya; secondly, Yoshihide Suga was appointed as Japan’s prime minister, following the abrupt resignation of Shinzo Abe. The two events are unrelated, yet the professional connection between Suga and Furuya suggests the two men are likely to be on the same page regarding key enforcement issues. Meanwhile, the UK is grappling with proposed legislation centering on state aid, which is attracting attention — and criticism — from both sides of the English Channel.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi there, welcome back to Emlex's weekly podcast covering the top regulatory issues around the globe.
0:16.9	My name is James Panicki. I'm from Emlex's Asia Pacific team.
0:27.6	Now, it feels like everyone these days has a strong opinion about Brexit and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. But the UK's departure from the EU has become bogged down in the more technical aspects of state aid,
0:34.6	something that may not fire up people's imagination as much as Bojo, but is
0:39.1	nonetheless central to the debate, and will rely on the usual erudition of our correspondent
0:45.0	Simon Zakaria for the lowdown on that story in just a few minutes from now.
0:50.1	First up, though, let's cross to Japan, where our reporters have been run off their feet over the past weeks,
0:55.6	with two significant events unrelated, yet somehow connected.
1:00.5	The first we'd all seen coming, the final days of Kazayuki Sugimoto's chairmanship of the Japan Fair Trade Commission, or JFTC.
1:09.2	His successor, Kazayuki Furuya, is now running the operation and today
1:13.6	will assess both Sugimoto's legacy and Furuya's CV. Then, of course, came the unexpected political
1:20.9	development, the resignation of Shinsuwabe, Japan's prime minister and the appointment of Yoshihida
1:26.9	Suga to the top job.
1:29.1	Toko Sekiguchi is a senior reporter with MNX, and she joins me now from Tokyo.
1:34.6	Toko, starting with the conclusion of Sugimoto's term at the helm of the JFTC,
1:40.9	how would you characterize his leadership?
1:47.9	Well, he came into office in 2013, just as the number of large-scale cartel and bid rigging cases were declining. Some people say
1:56.5	it's due to better compliance among companies, but cartel enforcement has been
2:03.6	gradually been declining on sort of a global scale, and some say that it's due to the spread of leniency,
2:10.7	etc., etc. But either way, during his reign, essentially all these cartels and bid rigging cases were replaced by
2:22.1	online companies and data economy and how to deal with these new companies.
2:29.1	And so his reign stood out in that it came at a time when the global economy was transforming from the
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