EU competition policy: based on political discretion? Many would agree that Brussels’ legislative priorities guide competition policy and enforcement. Under President Juncker’s mandate, the creation of an Energy Union, a Single Digital Market, and a better functioning internal market have been at the top of the agenda. In a recent interview with the Guardian, EU’s…
Introduction In Ireland’s first bid-rigging case the Court of Appeal in its 20 June 2018 judgment decided that: (i) the €7,500 fine imposed by the Central Criminal Court on Brendan Smith was unduly lenient and raised it to €45,000; but (ii) that it was not unduly lenient of the Central Criminal Court to have imposed…
Introduction On 27 September 2018, Turkish Competition Authority (“TCA”) published its decision[1] concerning the allegations that Roche Müstahzarları A.Ş. (“Roche”) had violated articles 4 and 6 of the Law on the Protection of Competition (“Competition Act”). Within this scope, the TCA re-evaluated whether (i) Roche’s agreement with a pharmaceutical wholesaler, Co-Re-Na Ecza Deposu Dış. Tic….
The CJEU’s judgment in MEO earlier this year seemed to be a welcome, final piece of the puzzle in the legal framework for analyzing when price discrimination is abusive. It was now relatively settled, it seemed, that for price discrimination to be an abuse of dominance, it must generally fall into one of two boxes…
The tech giant Google[1] has been under the Turkish Competition Authority’s (“TCA”) scrutiny due to its practices in the market for licensable mobile operating systems and under the judicial review since July 2015. In September 2018, the TCA has finally released its short decision and imposed a fine of TRY 93 million (approximately USD 15…
In July this year, the Bulgarian Commission for protection of competition (the “Bulgarian Commission”) blocked the acquisition of the vertically integrated business of CEZ Group of companies (owned by CEZ a.s., Czech Republic) in Bulgaria by Inercom EAD (Bulgaria). The refusal to approve the CEZ/Inercom transaction was discussed in a previous post. In August 2018,…
The CMA’s recent “economic working paper” on the use of algorithms to facilitate collusion and personalised pricing follows on the heels of other work in this area (including by CMA) but is a bit different because it focuses on economic evidence and analysis. While there is nothing in it about the ‘lawfulness’ of a given…
The General Court (GC) ruling of September 26 in Case T-574/14 constitutes an important (and possibly final) episode in the European Union’s (EU) review of the Spanish “dual pricing” and parallel trade saga. The GC found that the European Commission was not obliged to adopt a new decision as to whether an agreement GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) had put…
M&A and other transactions involving foreign companies might sometimes raise national security concerns in specific areas of the economy such as military, dual use, advanced technology, etc. To mitigate those concerns, national governments dealing with a great number of transactions used to establish the strategic investment regimes. In many jurisdictions, strategic investment regime requires either…
On September 4, 2018, the German Ministry for Economic Affairs has published a report by economic and legal experts analyzing some key issues of abuse of market power in the digital platform economy (see an English summary here.) The report provides an overview of the status quo and recommendations, and is understood to be the…
