In 2017 a two-judge Supreme Court Bench upheld the 'relevant turnover' approach to competition penalties, holding that 'turnover' in section 27 of the Competition Act means turnover from the goods affected by the contravention, not a firm's total turnover. A digest of the bid-rigging facts, the proportionality reasoning, the DG's investigative scope, and how the 2023 Amendment has since changed the penalty base.
NCLAT Principal Bench dismisses appeals against CCI's bid-rigging finding on the polyacetal protective-tubes suppliers to Indian Railways; reads 'punished accordingly' in Section 48(1) of the Competition Act 2002 (pre-2023 Amendment) to mean the individual penalty must match the enterprise penalty in scale, applied to the active partner's income.
On 7 April 2026 the Competition Commission held seventeen electrical contractors liable under s.3(3)(d) for cover bidding and bid rotation in APHCL tenders, but issued only a cease-and-desist direction under s.27(a) — calibrating contravention-finding against penalty-quantum where the contraveners are small enterprises with geographically circumscribed conduct.
The May 2026 NCLAT order setting aside the CCI's ₹301.6 crore penalty on Grasim Industries — on the procedural ground that the CCI failed to give the appellant notice of disagreement with the DG's findings — joins the April 2026 CCI directions for investigation into the Venkateshwara Hatcheries Group and the bid-rigging order against seventeen electrical contractors in the Assam Police Housing tenders. Read together with the closure of the Indigo / Air India cancellation-charges probe and the jurisdictional-boundary disposition in Roppen / Rapido, the cycle discloses the procedural and substantive contours of CCI practice as it stands at mid-2026.