The lack of commissioners in the plenary session of the Federal Economic Competition Commission (Cofece) has begun to slow down the processes of the antitrust regulator. The agency suspended the term to issue a final resolution on the existing payment barriers in the card payment system.
Last December, , which makes it impossible for new participants to enter the market.
But the absence of a full plenary session has forced the Commission to pause the next step, which consists of publishing a final opinion on the market, after having made the document public and submitting it to the opinion of the interested parties.
For this type of procedure, Cofece needs to have at least five of seven commissioners. But today its plenary session operates with only four of the seven members established by the Constitution.
The election of the new commissioners involves a process in which the Bank of Mexico and the National Institute of Statistics and Geography participate. The agencies have already done their part and have delivered three lists of candidates to the head of the executive. But President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has not sent the names of his selected candidates to the Senate, which will have to make the final decision.
In a statement, Cofece affirms that this is the third process that it has been forced to stop due to the lack of new appointments. The Commission presented a constitutional controversy last December for the omission of the president, who has stopped the process to complete its plenary session.
The final opinion that has been stopped in the Commission maintains that there are competition barriers that do not allow the entry of new participants to the card payment market, slow down innovation and increase the costs of the banks that affiliate the businesses.
Cofece proposes, in the preliminary version of the opinion, to disincorporate 51% of the shares of the E-Globa l and Prosa clearinghouses, which today are owned by some banks.
