Brasília, 3 September 2025 — Brazil’s Administrative Council for Economic Defense (CADE) has ruled that the codeshare agreement between airlines Gol and Azul must be formally notified to the antitrust authority within 30 days.
The case arose under a Procedure for the Investigation of a Concentration Act (Apac) to determine whether the contract should be subject to CADE’s review. Reporting judge Carlos Jacques emphasized that the matter did not concern a merger between the carriers, but rather the obligation to notify the codeshare agreement.
According to Jacques, codeshare contracts are not automatically exempt from antitrust scrutiny and must be assessed individually. He outlined criteria that may trigger CADE’s jurisdiction, including the participation of domestic airlines, overlapping route networks, the bilateral nature of the agreement, and whether the arrangement produces effects comparable to a merger — particularly in terms of coordination risks between competitors.
In his opinion, Jacques recalled CADE’s past analysis of codeshare deals and stressed that no presumption of pro-competitive benefits should be granted to such instruments. Each contract must be examined on its own merits. He noted that codeshare agreements involving domestic carriers on national routes raise greater competition concerns than those between international airlines. As a result, the precedent set in the TAM/Qatar case did not apply to the Gol-Azul arrangement.
The Tribunal unanimously endorsed the relator’s position, applying Article 88, §7 of Law No. 12,529/2011, which allows CADE to require notification of transactions that do not automatically qualify as concentration acts subject to mandatory review.
With the decision, Gol and Azul are prohibited from expanding their codeshare routes until CADE completes its analysis. If the companies fail to submit the agreement within the 30-day deadline, the contract must be suspended immediately, without affecting tickets already issued to consumers.
