Antitrust Guidelines for IMA Meetings
The IMA Antitrust Guidelines are thoughtfully designed to safeguard the association, its members, and working group participants from any inadvertent breaches of antitrust or competition law.
They serve to raise awareness by clearly highlighting sensitive topics that are off-limits, promote legal compliance by protecting the organization and its members, and offer clear guidance on how meetings, minutes, information sharing, and collaborative projects should be conducted to ensure full adherence to the law.
Beyond providing practical direction, these guidelines also serve as a tangible demonstration of the association’s proactive commitment to compliance, showing regulators and courts alike that the association takes every preventive measure to uphold fair and lawful competition.
Guidelines
- Participation in any Working Group activity is voluntary. Each participant is free to decline to participate in any Working Group meeting or activity.
- Each meeting will be conducted pursuant to a written agenda that is distributed in advance of the meeting. The Working Group will keep accurate minutes of each meeting. No comments may be made “off the record.”
- Meeting participants shall not discuss matters where their companies compete with each other or matters that are sensitive from a competitive standpoint. Such matters include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Individual company information on price (or any aspect of price), costs, production, capacity, inventories, sales or shipping rates.
- Individual company bids or bidding procedures.
- Individual suppliers, distributors, or customers.
- Participants must respect any warning by the meeting leader that a particular subject is off limits. If such a warning is disregarded, the meeting leader shall adjourn the meeting immediately and report the matter to the International Monorail Association.
Prohibited discussion topics apply equally to social gatherings incidental to Working Group meetings. Anyone involved in an improper discussion should terminate the discussion immediately and, if not successful, should withdraw from the discussion and report the occurrence to an International Monorail Association leader.
An IMA representative is present at every IMA meeting. He or she supports the chairperson in keeping to the agenda and taking the minutes. This also includes ensuring that no breach of antitrust law is committed during or as a result of the meeting; to this end, the IMA representative will rely on these guidelines.