Legal transplant: giving life to Malaysias competition regime

The idea of borrowing from foreign legal concepts is not new to East Asian states, including Malaysia. Despite being common law based, interestingly, Malaysia adopted European competition rules in its Competition Act 2010. Following the legal transplant theory, there was an informed transfer to adapt the transplanted law to local conditions, with the two key Malaysian prohibitions on anticompetitive agreement and abuse of dominance mirroring the principles in Articles 101 and 102 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union. The Malaysian Competition Act has more broadly stated objectives to meet specific sociopolitical and economic challenges, and bid rigging is expressly included in the regime. The Malaysian Competition Commission and the Competition Appeal Tribunal provide the institutional structure enabling the enforcement of significant cases, notably the MAS and AirAsia case, setting important precedents for Malaysian competition law.