Our partner Alan Thompson participated in the Seventh “Antitrust in the Americas” conference organized by the American Bar Association Antitrust Law Section on May 19-20 in the city of Cartagena, Colombia. Topics on the agenda included:

• Competition and innovation in financial services
• Competition and privacy in the age of AI
• Sustainability and competition
• Regional trends in abuse of dominance cases
• Recent developments in cartel investigations and leniency programs
• Challenges in cross-border merger control

With specific particularities in each country, Competition Law continues to advance in the region. In Costa Rica, the competition authority (Coprocom) has strengthened its staff and recently imposed for the first time the sanction of disqualification from public contracts in a bid rigging case.

Domestic and foreign companies doing business in Costa Rica would greatly benefit from obtaining expert advice and including competition rules and principles into their compliance policies.