Litigation Costs in the Competition Law Violation Cases

One of the issues that have received less attention in competition litigation cases in our legal system is the litigation costs problem. The Competition Council has several tasks under "the Act of the execution of the General Policies of Article 44 of the Constitution"(2007), which requires a great deal of expense to perform optimally. At present, these costs funded by the government. Although in the current state of the economy with considering other countries' approaches to financing these costs, it is better to have at least some of the funding required by the council from other sources (such as receiving fees from private applicants).This study investigates the experiences of the US, Canada, Japan, Turkey, Denmark, the UK, Swiss, Ireland, South Africa, and Hong Kong legal systems in providing competition litigation costs.This article, in an analytical way, examines the justification for collecting litigation costs. Using the experience of other legal systems, it proposes a method (along with suggesting some articles) for allocation of litigation costs in the Iranian competition law and merger control regime to introduce a basis for reforming the law and optimizing Iran's competition system.