OPENING OF INVESTIGATION INTO PROFESSIONAL ORDERS
PRESS RELEASE
PRESS RELEASE
ANTITRUST AUTHORITY OPENS INVESTIGATION INTO PROFESSIONAL ORDERS
Aim is to check whether they have done away with fixed and minimum fees and are allowing advertising and the setting up of interdisciplinary firms of professionals.
Over the next few months the Italian Competition Authority will assess whether the professional orders are introducing competitive principles into their statutes and codes of practice in line with the new regulations. The investigation will concentrate specifically on the orders covering architects, lawyers, tax accountants and bookkeepers, workplace consultants, pharmacists, geologists, building surveyors, journalists and freelancers, engineers, doctors and dentists, notaries, industrial technicians and psychologists. In particular, the inquiry will check on the abolition of professional rules limiting competition by way of fixed or minimum fee scales and the effective freedom professionals have to advertise or, in the case of lawyers, to work on a contingency fee basis, and recognition of the freedom to set up interdisciplinary firms of professionals.
In its resolution setting up the investigation, approved at its meeting on 18 January 2007, the Authority recalls its numerous interventions in the area of professional services, including launching inquiries into the professions over anti-competitive agreements, principles that are now enshrined in the liberalizing measures of the Bersani Decree; that decree banned obligatory tariffs and abrogated the prohibitions on professional advertising and on the establishment of interdisciplinary firms of professionals.
Since the Bersani Decree came into force, a number of the professionals' representative bodies have reached decisions which interpret the new rules in a restrictive manner. Equally inconsistent with the new regulations were the changes to the law on notaries, specifically in the matter of their fees, made by a legislative decree subsequent to the Bersani law. The Authority has also received submissions from individual professionals who complain of the conduct of a number of professional bodies in apparently attempting to prevent their members taking advantage of the competitive instruments provided for in the Bersani Decree.
The Authority draws attention to the fact that the obligation to make codes of conduct comply with the principles of competition by 1 January 2007, as stipulated in the Bersani Decree, applies to all representative bodies of the professions, whether they are constituted in the form of orders or colleges or even associations.
Rome, 29 January 2007