The Competition Tribunal ruled in favor of Nutripro S.A., Empresas Tucapel S.A., Comercial Terramar Ltda., ED&F Man Chile S.A., Agroexportadora e Importadora Ltda., Agrícola Tarapacá Ltda., Soprodi S.A. and Graneles de Chile S.A., in lawsuits against Puerto Terrestre Los Andes Sociedad Concesionaria S.A. (PTLA). The latter was sentenced to pay a fine of 350 Annual Tributary Units (around US$ 320,000).
PTLA infringed letter b) of article 3 of Decree Law 211, when it charged the maximum regulated tariff for the service of cargo loading and unloading, when they effectively provided a different, lower cost service than this.
The ruling established that PTLA is a monopoly in the provision of terrestrial port services in Paso de los Libertadores, providing the plaintiffs a service that consists in support of the inspections that frontier control authorities have to do (Servicio Agrícola Ganadero, Servicio de Salud and Servicio Nacional de Aduanas). This service does not consist of loading and unloading of trucks’ cargo, but basically extracting samples of the cargo. Despite this, PTLA charged users the regulated tariff of CL$ 105,000 (approximately US$ 210) per truck. This tariff corresponded to the service of loading and unloading of cargo, therefore the questioned charge is not protected under the concession contract.
Besides being legally unjustified, the Tribunal established that the charge is economically abusive, given that it doubles, and sometimes triples, the cost of providing the service.
Given the former considerations, besides imposing PTLA the aforementioned fine, the Tribunal ordered PTLA to abstain of charging the regulated tariff for loading and unloading cargo, when providing different services.
In January 28, 2011, the Supreme Court deemed this ruling ineffective.