Recently, there have been two striking cases of organisations behaving badly in a way that the outside world would think was well out of order. In the first example – the Roma Medical Aids case – it isn’t just about somebody breaking the rules. It’s about a company acting in a way that a half-decent…
The pantomime season has come early this year with the recent headline row over how oil prices are set. It is the show that has something for everyone. Furious motorists. Politicians looking for cheap and cheerful publicity. And the kind of villain that the public love to hiss and boo – an extremely wealthy industry….
Pushing people around is the flavour of the month right now. Indeed, both companies and regulators seem to be going in for it. Take the music industry, for instance. The US entertainment giant AEG has just bought up the rights for the Wembley Arena, previously owned by that other humungous US impresario, Live Nation. AEG…
In the UK competition world, it’s been the season for the god of quirks and small things. This has been a lot of fun. However, sadly we’re soon going to have to sober up and look at what lies beneath. But first let’s look at the quirks and small things. Towards the end of last…
Right now, the leitmotif in the competition world is the anger of the ordinary citizen. You thought this was an arena dominated by sober minded analysts, regulators and business executives? Think again. Take, for instance, the investigation into Britain’s retail road fuel industry – worth about £32bn – currently being conducted by the UK’s Office…
Sometimes it’s hard for regulators to see the world beyond the protective bubble in which they spend so much of their working lives. Professional preoccupations can easily blind them to the real concerns – or lack of them – of people living outside the bubble. Often this visual disability is accompanied by a strange failure…
In the run-up to the London Olympics, it seems particularly appropriate that the competition theme of the moment is all about fighting. Take Spain, for instance. The country’s antitrust authority – the Comisión Nacional de la Competencia (CNC) – has recently started legal proceedings against a bunch of matadors and a sports marketing rights consultancy…
The bigger they are, the harder they fall and the sounds of the crash get louder as the legal controls get weaker. Take, for instance, the recent £807.2m sale of Edinburgh airport to Global Infrastructure Partners. This is the latest disposal following the original recommendation by the UK Competition Commission (CC) that BAA’s airport operating…
There have been two big pieces of news in the UK recently: the resignation of John Fingleton, the chief executive of the Office of Fair Trading, and the heavily-trailed announcement of the newly merged OFT and Competition Commission, now called the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA). The link between the two events is probably only…
Sometimes competition law looks as if it’s on the side of the bullies. Take, for example, the French Autorité de la concurrence’s recent decision in the Paris food retail sector case. The Autorité came up with the idea of using a new tool – a structural injunction – to tackle retail concentration. This would let…
