On 16 July 2012, a U.S. appeals court issued a decision holding that pharmaceutical patent settlements that restrict generic entry and contain a payment to the generic company are presumptively unlawful under the U.S. antitrust laws.  The decision is a major victory for the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s view of pharmaceutical patent settlements with so-called…

Shortly after revealing proposed amendments to the Competition and Consumer Protection Act (for details, please see my post from May 22), the Polish Competition Authority (the President of the Office for Protection of Competition and Consumers) published draft guidelines on commitment decisions (“Guidelines”). Since PCA nowadays uses commitment decisions increasingly often (125 such decisions were…

In 2007, the European Commission prohibited Ryanair’s attempted hostile bid to acquire rival Irish airline, Aer Lingus. It also refused to order Ryanair to divest its 29.8% stake in Aer Lingus, which it had built up during its aborted public bid. The General Court later upheld both the prohibition of the merger and the refusal to require divestment of the minority shareholding. Subsequently, the UK Office of Fair Trading investigated Ryanair’s minority shareholding in Aer Lingus; Ryanair’s challenges to the OFT’s jurisdiction were rejected by both the Competition Appeal Tribunal and the Court of Appeal. On 1 June the Supreme Court refused Ryanair leave to appeal, thus confirming the OFT’s ability to investigate the transaction, which it referred to the Competition Commission on 15 June. However, immediately thereafter, Ryanair launched a third hostile bid to acquire Aer Lingus, leading to further litigation before the CAT to challenge the Competition Commission’s jurisdiction.
This blog post examines the complex interaction of European Commission and national authority jurisdiction to examine different transactions involving the same parties, as well as the OFT’s reasons for referring Ryanair’s minority shareholding to the Competition Commission.

The Competition Appeal Tribunal has upheld the Competition Commission’s decision to require Stericycle to divest the entirety of Ecowaste Southwest following its prohibition of the completed merger. In dismissing Stericycle’s appeal, the Tribunal confirmed that the Commission is not obliged to identify of its own motion all possible remedies, but merely those that would clearly resolve the harm to competition caused by the merger. It also held that, in a completed merger, the purchaser takes the risk of being required to divest the entire business acquired by it, if this is necessary to restore effective competition.

In a judgment handed down today (C-158/11 Auto 24), the EU Court of Justice (“CJEU”) confirmed that suppliers operating selective distribution systems (“SDSs”) are under no obligation to publish the criteria used to appoint distributors, and that a car manufacturer using a SDS based on quantitative criteria is under no obligation to apply these criteria…

On 15 May 2012, Advocate-General Mazák delivered his long awaited Opinion to the European Court of Justice in the long-running AstraZeneca litigation. Practitioners hoping for an opinion that tempered some of the more extreme dicta of the General Court were to be disappointed. Advocate-General Mazák recommended that the General Court’s judgment be upheld in its…

On 18 May 2012, the Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People’s Court (‘Shanghai Court’) dismissed allegations that Johnson & Johnson Medical (China) Ltd. and its Shanghai branch had set a minimum resale price in beach of China’s Anti-Monopoly Law (‘AML’) and rejected the plaintiff’s claim of damages of CNY 14.4 million (‘J&J RPM case’). It is…

At the end of last week, the European Competition Network (“ECN”) published a report on the competition law enforcement and market monitoring activities by the European competition authorities in the food sector. The report is an important reminder of the fact that at both the European and national level the EU food sector has been…

Cross-border antitrust enforcement issues are back on the agenda. The recent Toshiba judgment of the European Court of Justice (“ECJ”) has confirmed a number of principles governing the network enforcement system set forth in the EU by Regulation 1/2003. Recent national decisions involving the same companies and/or closely related sectors (e.g., the flour milling industry)…

On 19 May 2012, China’s Ministry of Commerce (‘MOFCOM’) announced its conditional clearance decision on the acquisition of Motorola Mobility by Google, which removed the last hurdle for the USD12.5 billion vertical deal. The MOFCOM is the only antitrust authority to impose remedies on its clearance of the transaction. The US Department of Justice, the…