The matter

The Pallas group is a diversified Indian business with three arms. Pallas Technologies India Private Limited manufactures personal system products and printer consumables, and sells both through a network of authorised resellers on a government e-procurement portal. In February 2024 Pallas filed a lesser penalty application disclosing coordination with those resellers. The Commission directed an investigation, and the Director General has since reported on two product lines separately: the personal system products, in which Pallas itself sometimes bid against its own resellers, and the consumables, in which it did not. Objections to both reports are now before the Commission, and no final order has been passed on either. Pallas Connect Private Limited operates a food-delivery platform. A consumer has filed information alleging that its commission structure, platform fees and the sequence in which charges are disclosed at checkout contravene the Act. Pallas Live Private Limited organises a national pageant and holds the licences for several international competitions in the same category. A former finalist has filed information over the terms imposed on participants and winners. The group's general counsel wants one consolidated note. Across the three arms, management has formed views on most of these questions and recorded them in board papers, internal notes and counsel's advice supplied to you.

Your role

From: Devika Rao, Partner To: Senior Associate Subject: Project Lodestar — your brief You are joining me on Project Lodestar, our mandate for the Pallas group. The group's general counsel has asked for a single consolidated note covering every proceeding the group currently faces. I have divided the work into four parts and will send each to you in turn. Your responsibilities: - apply the provisions supplied with each part as they stand, and identify precisely which provision reaches which conduct - work the figures in the annexures yourself; several of these questions turn on a base, a threshold or a sequence rather than on a rule you can state from memory - test every assumption management has recorded, and say plainly where one is wrong and why - where relief or a defence is unavailable, say so and identify what is available instead The group will act on this note. Be precise.

Learning objectives

• Establish whether a horizontal agreement exists across a set of tenders before assessing the position of a party that did not bid in all of them
• Apply the further proviso to Section 3(3) to a party not engaged in identical or similar trade
• and distinguish it from the route available under the main provision
• Advise on the liability of a bidder that won nothing and gained nothing
• Assess what evidence is capable of establishing an agreement
• and why parallel conduct alone is not
• Advise on the scope and duration of the protection given to a lesser penalty applicant's identity
• Compute penalty exposure from turnover data
• applying reductions in the correct sequence and to the correct base
• Distinguish aggravating from mitigating factors
• and advise on the treatment of a repeated contravention
• Identify which officers of an enterprise are personally exposed
• and on what basis
• Allocate contested contractual terms between the vertical agreements provision
• the abuse provision
• and neither
• Advise on dominance where no published market share data exists
• and on the definition of a narrow relevant market
• Identify which forms of relief are available for which contravention
• and at which procedural stage each may be offered
• Advise on the limits of challenging a procedural order
• and on the Commission's freedom to depart from the Director General's findings

Skills evaluated