Mexican minister of economy to highlight ABA Antitrust in the Americas conference in Mexico City

Ildefonso Guajardo Villarreal, Mexico’s Minister of Economy, will be the keynote speaker at the American Bar Association’s fourth biennial Antitrust in the Americas conference June 1-2 in Mexico City, Mexico. The conference is co-sponsored by the Colegio de Barra Mexicana Colegio de Abogados and Brazil’s IBRAC.

Guajardo has overseen sweeping reforms to Mexico’s competition law and agencies that formed a capstone of President Enrique Peña Nieto’s economic reforms. As minister of economy, he will be a key figure in any renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Participants will include Alejandra Palacios, president of Mexico’s Federal Economic Competition Commission (COFECE); Esteban Greco, chairman of Argentina’s National Commission for the Defense of Competition; Felipe Irarrazabal, national economic prosecutor of Chile; Alexandre Cordeiro Macedo, commissioner of Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE); Brent Snyder, deputy assistant attorney general, Antitrust Division, Department of Justice; and Abbott Lipsky, acting director, Federal Trade Commission, Bureau of Competition.

The conference will include interactive discussions with experts from throughout the region on cutting-edge topics, including:

Insights on cartel enforcement, bid rigging and lenience programs from cartel enforcers throughout the region;

Merger enforcement developments, including the use of economics to guide enforcers’ decisions;

The use of tools to address barriers in markets that do not necessarily have roots in traditional anticompetitive conduct;

Antitrust enforcement in the telecommunications sector; and

The views of both judges and enforcement officials from throughout the hemisphere.

Other conference speakers will include former FTC chairman and current corporate general counsel Deborah Platt Majoras; Judge Diane Wood of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Chicago; Maria Elena Estavillo Flores, commissioner, Instituto Federal de Telecomunicaciones (IFT), Mexico City; Jean Claude Tron Petit, magistrate, Fourth Administrative Court of the First Circuit, Mexico City; and Carlos Mena Labarthe, chief prosecutor, Comisión Federal de Competencia Económica, Mexico City.