Employees of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection were involved in searches at the offices of companies from the IT sector. They secured electronic data, mainly e-mails exchanged between employees of the companies.
The actions of UOKiK were related to an ongoing investigation as part of which the Office is verifying whether, between Polish companies of the Dell Technologies corporation and their business partners, any restrictive agreements were concluded. It concerns the sale of Dell and Dell EMC brand products, including IT servers and disk arrays used to store, administer and share processed data.
“We suspect that market sharing may have occurred. Companies and state institutions which wanted to buy IT equipment could have been assigned to individual vendors. Thus, they may not have been able to obtain a cheaper offer from other Dell distributors, even if they approached them. We also suspect that the manufacturer may have disciplined partners who did not comply with the agreements”, says Marek Niechciał, the President of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection.
The suspected practices may have infringed both Polish and EU legislation. The authority has therefore informed the European Commission of the matter.
