Margarida Matos Rosa, president of the Portuguese Competition Authority

WASHINGTON – Access to a national database of public procurement data in Portugal is helping antitrust officials increase their enforcement efforts, according to Margarida Matos Rosa, president of the Portuguese Competition Authority. With a decade of historical quantitative and qualitative data to draw from, Portuguese officials are able to track anticompetitive trends, Rosa says in this interview recorded at the 2018 annual AMA Spring Antitrust Meeting.

WASHINGTON – Antitrust enforcers in Portugal are focused on violations occurring in public procurement, in part because “it’s weight on our economy is really big,” Margarida Matos Rosa, president of the Portuguese Competition Authority, says in this interview, recorded at the 2018 annual ABA Spring Antitrust Meeting. Using a variety of tools, including a national historical data base of public procurement data, has helped increase the number of cases brought to the agency for review. “We are still perfecting our methodology, but we have seen a significant increase in the number of cases [reported],” says Rosa. Trend analyses have also helped the agency track whether companies are using algorithms in anti-competitive ways. by Whitney McKnight