Kommunal konkurrens - En granskning av reglerna om kommunal kompetens, laglighetsprövning och konkurrensbegränsande offentlig säljverksamhet

Sammanfattning: Anti-competitive activities by municipal entities has been the subject of legal discussion in Sweden for decades. Regulation on municipal authority and legality review in the Swedish Municipality Act (2017:725) was complemented with a so-called conflict resolution rule in the Competition Act (2008:579) in 2010. The new rule grants the possibility to prohibit municipal businesses or behaviours harmful to the competition, provided that the business or behaviour is not justifiable on the grounds of public interest. Despite this, anti-competitive municipal activities continue to plague markets. This essay investigates the market protection offered by the Swedish local government law and competition law, and seeks to identify which flaws in these regulations that allow unlawful municipal activities to remain an issue for markets. When attempting to treat the regulations together, the picture of a somewhat fragmented rule complex emerges. The new competition rule is not well adapted to dealing with the underlying problems of insufficient means of control of unlawful municipal actions. Instead, there are several examples where municipal actions contrary to regulation on municipal authority were allowed to continue because the evidence on market effects did not meet the high standard evidentiary requirements.