It prohibits abuse of market power through acquisitions or mergers with competing enterprises, ceasing or reducing production, and seeking to impede the functioning of a competing enterprise. The law enacted in 1994 defines market power as existing whenever an enterprise or group of enterprises controls a substantial portion of the market. Other criminal violations do not require the existence of market power. These include any agreements or collusive arrangements to fix prices, to allocate markets, to control sources of supplies or channels of distribution to the detriment of competition, to hoard or destroy products in order to create a monopoly, or to set prices in order to harm competitors. It is, likewise, a crime to tie the sale of a product or service to the purchase of a different product or service, if this is done with the purpose of discriminating between purchasers, unless one of the purchasers is a distributor of the producer's goods.
All criminal violations require a mental state equivalent to scienter.
The criminal enforcement of antitrust provisions is still relatively rare in Brazil. Creditors can bring judicial action affer the merger to request its annulment. A joint venture may be a violation of the antitrust laws if it is used as a means to eliminate competition from the market. In the 1994 Brasilit case, CADE denied a request for the creation of a joint venture company between Bralisit, S.A. and Eternit, S.A., which would have merged the asbestos tile and water tank manufacturing operations of both companies in the Southern Region of Brazil. The Brasilit decision discusses market concentration, stating that even though it is not necessarily anticompetitive, it can invite anticompetitive conduct and, when it reaches high indexes, may have detrimental effects by suppressing potential competition.