Reconciling Sustainability with Competition Laws—Greenhushing, Greenwashing and Sustainability Agreements
摘要
When corporate entities act together to achieve sustainable goals, they violate competitions laws. This so-called cartel agreements are prohibited by the competition laws across the globe if they make the product or services more expensive to consumers. Agreements between companies to make their products and services more sustainable will regularly increase their price for end consumers, at least in the short term. Only recently states started reacting with legislative reforms to include sustainability in their competition equation. Any kind of more lenient competition law policy potentially opens the door to legalizing greenwashing by companies. It creates a need for parallel legislation against unfair commercial practices that clearly prohibits greenwashing activities. Saudi Arabia has a relatively new competition law based on EU law as a role model, but without any explicit exception for sustainability agreements. The Saudi Anti-Fraud Law and the first draft of Consumer Law also do not clearly prohibit greenwashing. The paper discusses which model should be followed for reform that allows sustainability agreements and fights against greenwashing.