On 1 June 2014, Mr János Áder, the President of the Hungarian Republic appointed Dr Zoltán Bara as a new member of the Competition Council of the Gazdasági Versenyhivatal (GVH - Hungarian Competition Authority). The appointments of the Members of the Competition Council are for a period of six years.
The Competition Council is a separate and independent decision-making body within the GVH, but its decisions are subject to judicial review. Therefore, a decision on the substance of a case may only be made by the Competition Council proceeding in the case. If the parties to a case challenge a decision in court, the Competition Council is also allowed to defend the decision of the GVH with the assistance of the legal experts of the GVH. The Competition Council is also responsible for reviewing the orders of the case handlers within the course of a procedure.
The Chair of the Competition Council - who is also endowed with the responsibilities of one of the Vice Presidents of the GVH - organises and supervises the activities of the Competition Council, while in competition supervision procedures, the decisions are concluded by the Competition Council in a panel of three or five members.
The Members of the Competition Council also participate in the competition advocacy tasks of the GVH and contribute to the efforts to disseminate competition culture in Hungary.
Dr Zoltán Bara graduated from the (now known) Corvinus University of Budapest (then known as the Karl Marx University of Economics) where he has been working as a lecturer ever since (as a professor since 2011).
He spent 8 months in Chicago, at the DePaul University as a researcher in 1987-88 before working as a lecturer in the Department of Economics at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University, Camden in 1990 where he taught a range of economics subjects. After two years, he returned to his home university to become the Head of Department of Comparative Economic Systems. He then taught as a guest lecturer at several universities; he worked in Hungary (as Head of Department) and also in other countries as an expert of economic transformation related to regime changes. He defended his PhD thesis in 1994 on the topic of competition law and oligopoly theories. Between 2001 and 2007 he was a member of the GVH’s Competition Council. After this period he worked as a competition law-economics expert, while also developing and teaching courses related to competition law for economics students at the Corvinus University of Budapest and also at the University of Pannonia in Veszprém. In addition, he is a lecturer of the post-graduate competition law specialist course at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University. In 2011 he returned to the GVH as the Head of the Competition Policy Section. He has published more than one hundred studies, several among them on the topic of competition law. He speaks and publishes in English.
Budapest, 28 May 2014
Hungarian Competition Authority
Further Information:
Katalin GONDOLOVICS
Spokeswoman
Mail: 1054 Budapest, V. ker. Alkotmány u. 5.
Postal address: 1245 Budapest, 5. POB 1036
Tel: (+36-1) 472-8902
Email: press@gvh.hu
http://www.gvh.hu