Greenland's 2026 Competition Bill: Disciplined Powers, Unanswered Questions

On 28 April 2026, Inatsisartut gave the Competition Act amendment its first reading. The bill – available together with its explanatory memorandum – would give the Consumer and Competition Authority (Forbruger- og Konkurrencestyrelsen) market investigation powers, sector inquiry powers, and a stop-the-clock in merger review, alongside a set of procedural corrections. Second reading is scheduled for 10 June; entry into force is set for 1 July 2026.

The bill in outline

The amendment has six elements. Three are substantive: market investigations (new sections 30 a–30 e), sector inquiries (new section 30 f), and a stop-the-clock in merger review (new section 20(6)–(7)). Three are procedural: narrower case-file access and disapplication of personal-data access rights (sections 24 and 24 b); continuity of the Competition Council and an open-application process for the consumer seat (section 27); and statutory footing for the Council's voting rules (section 27 a).

At first reading, Demokraatit and Inuit Ataqatigiit supported the bill. Atassut supported committee treatment. Siumut declined to support it in its current form, while agreeing to committee treatment, and asked whether the regime fits a small, dispersed market; whether the Competition Council (Konkurrencerådet) is hollowed out when the Authority investigates, assesses, and acts; whether intervention without infringement crosses a rule-of-law line; and whether the reform can be absorbed within the Authority's existing budget.

Market investigations: a new power with old roots

1. The 2024 grocery report

The political occasion is a Finance Act appropriation for 2026 and 2027 to investigate retail-food margins. That appropriation sits alongside what was, in substance, a sector inquiry the Authority has already completed: the February 2024 Market study of the Greenlandic grocery market (Markedsundersøgelse af dagligvaremarkedet i Grønland), a margin-, price-, and dominance-level study that found no indication of supranormal profits, no abuse of dominance, and no price coordination. The preparatory works do not engage with it. Markets change, and re-examination can be justified – but the legislator has not explained what the 2024 findings missed or what has changed.

The Greenlandic finding is not isolated. The UK CMA, Ireland's CCPC, and the Greenlandic Consumer and Competition Authority have each, in the last three years, run careful margin analyses of their grocery sectors and reached broadly the same conclusion: high food inflation has been driven by input costs rather than weak retail competition, and operating margins have compressed. The CMA confirmed its reading in a 2024 update; the CCPC restated its 2023 conclusion in August 2025; and Sweden's 2024 inquiry was more sceptical of the sector. Norway fined the three largest grocery chains approximately NOK 4.9 billion in August 2024 for illegal information exchange through "price hunters" – but coordination, not margin exploitation, was the Norwegian problem. Where careful margin analysis has been done, the answer has sometimes been "no problem", sometimes "a different problem", and almost never the obvious political one.

2. The evidentiary mismatch

That backdrop sharpens a problem the preparatory works do not name. The 2024 Market study is the most recent systematic evidence the Authority has about the sector named in the 2026 appropriation. Conditions may have moved since early 2024 – supply-chain volatility, shipping and freight costs, and shifting consumer patterns could justify a fresh look – but the preparatory works do not identify any such change as the reason for reopening the file. The findings – no supranormal profits, no abuse of dominance, no coordination – point away from the theories of harm the appropriation seems to anticipate.

That mismatch matters at two stages. At initiation, the Council must identify signs of conditions that weaken effective competition against a record that recently found the opposite. The public consultation on the draft section 30 a decision is where that tension will be tested. At remedy stage, the "clearly weakens" threshold in section 30 b is hard to clear when the starting evidence points the other way, and proportionality will require an explanation of why a remedy is warranted where the most recent structural study saw no harm to remedy.

There is also an institutional risk. When legislative appropriation precedes the investigation and names the sector, the Authority enters the case with an expectation attached. The safeguards against confirmation bias are the consultation record at initiation and the evidentiary discipline at order stage – and both will do more work in the grocery case than in a section 30 a investigation opened on the Authority's own motion.

3. What the criteria require

Sections 30 a–30 e let the Authority investigate conduct or structures that weaken effective competition without having to show that anyone has broken the law. The regime has one trigger and two substantive gates.

The trigger, section 30 a, vests the initiation decision in the Competition Council. The Council may open an investigation only where it finds signs of conditions that weaken effective competition, after public consultation on the draft initiation decision.

The first gate is a behavioural order under section 30 b. The Authority must find that conduct or structures clearly weaken effective competition, and any order must be reasonable, necessary, and proportionate. The preparatory works require significant harm and documentation that the structure is clearly weakened, including, where relevant, unexplained and disproportionate prices or margins against what one would expect under effective competition in Greenland. An order that fails to establish significance, or ignores offsetting efficiencies or consumer benefits, will be vulnerable on its own terms.

The second gate is remedy selection. Between two equally effective remedies, the Authority must choose the less burdensome one, and offsetting consumer benefits must be weighed.

Two further constraints matter. Orders are prospective only; companies cannot be sanctioned for the conduct committed by order addresses. Section 30 c allows commitments on a lower evidentiary threshold than an order: the Authority needs only to find that conduct weakens competition and that the commitments would remedy it. The Authority can therefore close a case to a lower standard than it would need for a contested order, and undertakings avoid an adverse finding by offering commitments. Many cases are therefore likely to end under section 30 c rather than as section 30 b orders. Section 30 e imposes a two-year hard stop, extendable once by six months.

4. Continuity with the existing framework

Market investigations are not a transplant without domestic roots. Section 13 already lets the Competition Council order the Self-Government, municipalities, and similar bodies to cease commercial activity that distorts, or may distort, effective competition. Section 14 extends that logic to entities under decisive public influence. The 2026 amendment does to private undertakings what sections 13 and 14 already do to public ones, but with procedural safeguards – Council approval, consultation, documented harm, proportionality, time limits, and remedy-selection rules – that go beyond section 13.

Two points follow. First, the procedural safeguards in sections 30 a–30 e set a higher bar for private-sector intervention than sections 13 and 14 do for public-sector intervention – an asymmetry the preparatory works do not explain and that the committee may wish to test. Second, Atassut's concern about Self-Government-owned undertakings is answered by the architecture of the existing Act rather than by anything in the bill: sections 13 and 14 already apply to them, and nothing in the amendment alters that.

Sector inquiries: the quieter workhorse

The Authority has in effect been running sector inquiries already. The 2024 Market study is the clearest example: a sector examined, findings published, and no binding order available on the back of the study itself. What section 30 f adds is not analytical capability – that is demonstrably there – but compulsory powers.

Section 30 f introduces a lighter parallel instrument to market investigations. The Authority can examine a sector, or categories of agreements across sectors, and publish the results. No Council approval is required, and the inquiry cannot be the basis for an order. The change from current practice is procedural: information obligations are full; dawn raids are available, subject to judicial authorisation; and deliberate submission of misleading information is sanctionable. Those compulsory powers are the real addition – they convert voluntary cooperation in a study like the 2024 Market study into enforceable participation. For undertakings, the impact is less about orders than about reputational and political exposure: a published sector report can reshape the legislative agenda long after the inquiry closes, as the 2024 Market study itself now demonstrates.

Stop the clock

Section 20(6)–(7) interrupts the statutory merger-review deadlines under two cumulative conditions.

First, the Council's need for the information must itself be attributable to circumstances on the parties' side – not merely that parties failed to deliver, but that the reason the information was needed traces back to something the parties did or omitted. That is stricter than the EU mechanic, where non-delivery suffices regardless of why the request arose. The preparatory works also proportionality-constrain the assessment: nature of the information, timing of the request, and the parties' realistic ability to produce it.

Second, a Council-set deadline must have been missed, and the clock restarts only when the information is in, with no fresh deadline. For time-sensitive deals, that is a material change in how merger review will be lived. No express carve-out exists for disputes about the scope of an information request, so parties who consider a request excessive will have to weigh that objection against the cost of a stopped clock. That is not necessarily a defect: the point of section 20(6)–(7) is to prevent review periods from expiring while information needed because of circumstances on the parties' side remains outstanding.

The bill tightens the review timetable for notifiable mergers, but it does not introduce a call-in power for transactions below the jurisdictional thresholds. That matters in a small economy: acquisitions that fall below turnover thresholds may still affect local market structure, especially where the target is small but strategically important. Denmark introduced a below-threshold call-in option in 2024 as part of the same reform wave that produced market investigations. Greenland has so far chosen the narrower fix: preventing non-cooperation in cases already caught by merger control, not expanding merger control to catch additional cases.

Procedural corrections with real consequences

1. Case-file access and data-subject rights (sections 24 and 24 b)

Section 24 narrows access to own information so it applies only to undertakings, and only where a decision has been or will be taken. Section 24 b goes further: duties to inform, and data subjects' rights to access their personal data under the Greenlandic personal-data legislation (the Danish persondatalov as extended to Greenland), do not apply in competition cases at all. The Authority's rationale is operational: competition files contain large volumes of personal data, including material swept up in dawn raids, and individual access rights could open a back door into other undertakings' confidential information. Greenland remains outside the GDPR, but the personal-data legislation closely mirrors the 1995 Directive. A blanket disapplication of chapters 8 and 9, rather than case-by-case reliance on existing exemptions, prioritises investigative integrity over individual data-protection rights. Whether a narrower carve-out limited to ongoing investigations would achieve the same operational purpose at lower rights cost is a question for the Committee before 10 June.

2. Council continuity and the consumer seat (section 27)

Section 27 keeps Council members in office after their four-year term until a new Council is appointed, and replaces consumer-organisation nomination with an open application process advertised at least three months in advance. The continuity rule prevents an inquorate Council at the moment politically sensitive investigations are most vulnerable to delay. The consumer-seat change is revealing: the previous rule was unworkable because the nominating organisations do not exist. An open call solves the appointment problem while leaving the representation problem unaddressed.

3. Voting rules (section 27 a)

The Council's voting rules previously lived in a repealed executive order. Section 27 a restores them in statutory form: written procedure or meeting, quorum of Chair (or Deputy Chair) plus three other members, simple majority, and Chair's casting vote on a tie.

Conclusion

The bill's text is more disciplined than its headline powers suggest, but the discipline will be tested on three fronts. First, the evidentiary mismatch: the first announced case is a sector the Authority studied in 2024 and found unproblematic on margins, dominance, and coordination, while the preparatory works do not say what has changed. Second, the private/public asymmetry: sections 30 a–30 e set a higher bar for private-sector intervention than sections 13 and 14 do for public-sector intervention, and the preparatory works do not explain why. Third, the merger-control perimeter: the bill tightens the timetable for notifiable mergers but leaves below-threshold transactions outside the Authority's reach, while Denmark has moved in the opposite direction.

Whether the regime holds to its criteria will depend on the Council's willingness to refuse weak investigations, on the Authority's willingness to close investigations that do not reach the "clearly weakens" threshold, and on the Court in Greenland's willingness to take proportionality seriously. A regulator equipped with section 30 a will face political pressure to use it, and the first case will set the tone.

Before second reading on 10 June, three legal points deserve committee attention:

·       Sections 30 a–30 e: make clear in the preparatory works that re-examination of sectors already studied requires a specific explanation of what has changed or was missed, tied to the public-consultation record.

·       Merger control: consider whether the bill should remain limited to stop-the-clock for notifiable mergers, or whether Greenland also needs a narrowly framed call-in power for below-threshold transactions with local structural significance.

Section 24 b: replace the blanket disapplication of data-subject rights with a narrower carve-out limited to what is necessary to protect ongoing investigations, confidential information, and effective