Market supervision fine-tuned to help business

Shanghai's market supervision authorities are striving to avoid a one-size-fits-all approach to reduce the loss to businesses which have unintentionally or only slightly broken laws, and have corrected their illegal acts.

Market entities can avoid enforcement measures such as sealed operation sites and equipment seizure, after the local market supervision bureau and justice bureau jointly released a list of exemptions from some administrative punishments.

The list is the first of this kind in the city.

A total of seven conditions have been included in the list.

It specified that "if an entity's illegal act has no obvious social harm, and it has corrected and cooperated with the investigation by officials," it can avoid some of the enforcement measures.

In addition, the list is clear that if there is evidence to prove that the production materials and tools in illegal cases can be used for other legal production and operation activities, they will be exempted from being sealed up or seized.

Previously, if the entire production line of a company had been sealed up due to quality problems with a few of products, all types of products on the same line would have been suspended. Although the administrative act was following the law, it would have caused a large loss to the company.

The list draws a line in protecting public interest.

If a business's illegal acts break the line, it will trigger enforcement from market supervision authorities.