Have your sustainability agreement assessed
Do you wish to collaborate with other businesses to increase sustainability? However, are you unsure whether such arrangements are allowed within the competition rules, even after consulting with a legal advisor? Within 7 to 10 weeks, you will have more certainty. In that way, you can avoid a fine.
On this page:
Step-by-step overview of informal assessments
In the below infographic, we explain the steps that we follow when conducting an informal assessment of your sustainability agreement. Next, we provide more details about each step.
The infographic presents a flow chart, which describes the various steps of informal assessments of sustainability agreements by ACM. It says that, before launching a collaboration and after consulting with a legal advisor, you may contact ACM. ACM can informally assess whether a collaboration is compatible with the competition rules. The flow chart consists of the following steps: a self-assessment, a first meeting, a round of written questions, a second meeting, the final assessment and publication, and the implementation of the agreement. More information can be found in the policy rule regarding ACM’s oversight of sustainability agreements on Policy rule ACM’s oversight on sustainability agreements.
Step 1: Conducting a self-assessment
Find out how you can assess yourself whether your sustainability agreement is allowed under the competition rules (in Dutch). Make sure you are well prepared. We will then be able to assess your agreement more quickly.
Step 2: Telling us about your plan
File a request for an informal assessment. Please send your request to acm-post [at] acm [punt] nl (acm-post[at]acm[dot]nl). Please include in your request, in any case:
- all the information from your self-assessment (step 1);
- the names of the businesses involved and a contact person;
- a description of your sustainability agreement and your self-assessment, insofar as possible;
- whether you have had any contact with another authority or a court;
- whether your request contains any confidential business information; and
- what part of the agreement you would like us to assess informally.
We will conduct an assessment on the basis of your information. Therefore, please provide us with all the information that is important for our assessment.
This step takes, on average, six to eight weeks. In this step, we also schedule two meetings with you.
First meeting
We will invite you to a first meeting. In this meeting, we will explain our approach, and ask you questions about your initiative. You can explain your initiative in greater detail.
After the first meeting, we will send you follow-up questions by email, if any.
Second meeting
In the second meeting, we will respond to your initiative. There are three possibilities:
- We do not see any major risks to competition.
- We do see risks. In that case, we will discuss together what solutions are available for eliminating those risks.
- We do not have sufficient information for getting a clear picture of the initiative. As a result, we will ask more questions.
Step 3: Receiving our response to your request
If we believe that the agreement is in order, we will not carry out any further investigation. We will inform you about this. You will not receive any formal approval for your agreement.
We will publish our informal assessment on our website. We will do so in consultation with you. This will help other businesses that also want to do business in a more sustainable manner. On average, this step takes between one and two weeks.
Step 4: Implementing the agreement
If our informal assessment is positive, you can implement your sustainability agreement with other businesses. You remain responsible for acting in accordance with the agreement. We expect you to comply with the agreement.
The agreement may, at a later time, turn out not to be in line with the competition rules after all, for example, following a complaint. Should such a situation arise, we will give you the opportunity to bring the agreement in line with the rules. In such cases too, we will help you with this. We will not impose a fine if you have acted in good faith, and adjust the agreement.
Does your agreement affect other countries? The authorities (competition authorities or otherwise) in those countries are not required to follow our decisions or assessments.
If you did not request an informal assessment
You are not required to file a request for an informal assessment. Did you test your sustainability agreement against our rules? And did you make that agreement publicly known to consumers and businesses? If so, you need not fear a fine if it turns out at a later time that the agreement is not in line with the competition rules after all. However, you will need to adjust the agreement in consultation with us or after we have intervened.