The regional office of Federal Antimonopoly Service of Russia in the Leningrad region has filed a case against state-owned monopoly Russian Railways (RZD) for breaching the law on “Protection of Competition,” FAS said in a statement.
An earlier report said, that in January 2012 the company Petrotrans-Primorsk LLC., operating in the port of Primorsk, filed an appeal with the antimonopoly service against the Russian state-owned rail monopoly. The company planned to build a spur line of non-public use linked to RZD railway (at the Yermilovo railyard) to deliver oil products to the sea port and submitted an application to RZD as the owner of public infrastructure for coordination of the rail track project. In its turn, the RZD preconditioned the project approval in requirements specification, requiring the applicant to perform some activities on the development of the entire railway networks being in public use, including the construction and electrification of the railways, new switches, communication and information systems.
At the same time, technical specifications given by RZD to other companies that are engaged in handling oil products in the port Ust-Luga were given fewer requirements to perform the development of the public use railway infrastructure. According to the applicant and antitrust agency, such actions of the railway monopoly may be qualified as creation of unequal and discriminatory conditions for access to the commodity market and has put LLC Petrotrans-Primorsk at a disadvantage compared to other economic entities.
"Creation of equal conditions of entrepreneurial activity for businesses in the region is a guarantee for good investment climate and, therefore, the increase of the attractiveness of the region for business," said deputy head of the regional FAS Gleb Konnov.