In order to ensure that the overall price of necessities such as vegetables, grains, oils, meat, poultry and eggs, as well as anti-epidemic supplies such as masks and disinfectants remain stable during the epidemic prevention and control period and prevent hotels etc. from maliciously increasing prices, the Market Supervision and Administration Bureau of Hainan Province issued a “reminder and warning on the following operators and relevant units in the Province:
1. Strictly abide by the pricing laws of the People’s Republic of China, the provisions on the price of goods and the provisions on prohibiting fraud, and wilfully advance a sense of social responsibility, strengthen price control and ensure stability.
2. Do not abuse the current epidemic prevention situation as an opportunity to fabricate or drive up prices, push commodity prices to rise excessively or disrupt market price order.
3. Do not collude with other people / establishments to manipulate market prices and harm the lawful rights and interests of other operators or consumers. There must be no price monopoly behaviour that eliminates or restricts competition.
4. Except for production or personal use, the normal storage quantity or storage period shall not be exceeded, and an excessive number of commodities with tight market supply and abnormal price fluctuations shall not be over stocked.
5. In the process of selling epidemic prevention products, it is not allowed to bundle other commodities together to artificially increase the price of epidemic prevention articles in a disguised form.
6. Hotels are not allowed to significantly increase prices based off actual transaction prices before the epidemic (January 19, 2020).
7. When conducting promotional activities, business operators shall not use false or misleading prices based on fictitious original prices or false preferential discounts to induce consumers or other business operators to trade with them.
8. All business operators must implement a system of clearly marked pricing, make sure that the price tag is complete, the content of the price tag is true and clear, the writing is clear, and the goods label is aligned and is clearly visible. The commodities shall not be sold at a price higher than the marked price and any fees not marked shall not be charged.
9. All business operators should increase their awareness of operations according to law, honesty and trustworthiness, establish and improve their internal price management system and error correction mechanism, and handle price disputes properly and in a timely manner.
10. Price violations shall be severely punished. If an operator violates the provisions on clearly marked prices, he / she may be fined up to 5,000 Yuan in accordance with the law;
Business operators who increase prices, hoard, fabricate or spread false price increase information, collude with each other or are involved in other illegal pricing acts, the illegal income shall be confiscated and the maximum penalty can be up to 5 times the illegal income or a fine of 1 million to 5 million Yuan;
If the circumstances are serious, they may be ordered to suspend business or have their business license revoked.
If price violations are discovered, the public are encouraged to call 12345 or 12315 to report their complaints.
The services are mostly in Chinese but they do have English language speakers on hand, so please be patient.
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