Continuing with the trend from previous years, important competition law and policy developments emerged in the UK during 2023. Amongst other things, highly anticipated proposals for major legislative reform were finally introduced in the UK Parliament, the UK’s competition and sector authorities continued to handle a substantial enforcement caseload, whilst the UK government continued to…
Introduction In 2023, the ACM has again shown its commitment to enforcing competition law with the aim of protecting the interests of consumers. The imposition of hefty fine of nearly 8 million EUR on LG for vertical price-fixing conduct, similar to the Samsung case in 2022, sends a strong message to other companies engaging in…
2023 proved another fruitful year for the Belgian competition law scene. The ambitious agenda of the Belgian Competition Authority (“BCA”) resulted in a busy and impressive enforcement record. To sum up a couple of highlights in a single sentence, the BCA: was the first competition authority to apply the landmark Towercast judgment, conducted several sectoral…
Although 2023 was not a year of significant changes to the competition legislative landscape in Cyprus, it witnessed the implementation of competition law developments from 2022, in both substantive and ancillary legislation. Regulatory background In Cyprus, competition law is governed by the Protection of Competition Law of 2022 (Law No. 13(I)/2022). Law 13(I)/2022, in…
Cartels and Restrictive Agreements Policy and Procedure Revised Settlement Guidelines On 6 November 2023, the AFCA published revised settlement guidelines. Based on these revised guidelines, the AFCA will apply a settlement discount of up to 15% (compared to 20% under the previous settlement guidelines of 2004). In addition, the revised settlement guidelines expressly recognise the…
Competition policy For the Czech competition law, 2023 was a year of significant developments. To begin with, after more than 2 years after the implementation deadline, the Czech Competition Act was finally brought in line with the ECN+ Directive. The Czech Parliament used the amendment to introduce numerous changes to the existing toolkit of the…
Below we cover the main competition law developments in Spain in 2023, concerning (i) institutions and legislation, (ii) antitrust, (iii) mergers, and (iv) State aid. The selection, as usual with these lists, is partly subjective. Institutions and Legislation Royal Decree-Law 5/2023 Reforms the Spanish Competition Law On 29 June 2023, Royal Decree-Law 5/2023 approving…
The year 2023 was an eventful year from a Swiss Competition perspective. With the merger of the two Swiss banks UBS and Credit Suisse in March 2023, the Swiss financial market and Swiss merger control were immediately in the news around the world. However, there were also other important competition law developments in 2023. Namely,…
In 2023, almost all economic sectors were impacted by the public enforcement of competition law of the Italian Competition Authority (“ICA”) and by judgments of Italian courts. As for previous years, we will summarise below the cases that we deem the most noteworthy, without any aspiration of being exhaustive, starting from the organizational and legal…
The French Competition Authority (“FCA”) is one of the most vigorous national competition authorities (“NCA”) of the European Competition Network. For instance, it opened 333 investigations between 2004 and 2022, not that far behind the 447 investigations initiated by European Commission (see the statistics here). 2023 was not an exception, with an active fight against…
