Introduction In the past two years, the Czech Competition Authority (CCA) added several new tools to its arsenal for competition enforcement. This year the CCA and the Government of the Czech Republic proposed another significant set of updates to the Czech Act No. 143/2001 Coll., on the Protection of Competition (the Act). Arguably, the most…

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…

The Czech Competition Authority (CCA) recently announced that it prepared a proposal to update the Czech Competition Act (the “Act”). While at present the proposal is just a set of ideas, it indicates how Czech competition enforcement may evolve in the years to come. Crucially, the CCA suggests deploying a “new competition tool” that will…

Summary of Facts On 21 September 2023 the Advocate General Juliane Kokott presented her opinion in the Case C-605/21, Heureka Group a.s. v. Google LLC. The opinion addresses a request for a preliminary ruling from the Prague Municipal Court, which is hearing Heureka’s follow-on action against Google based on the Commission’s Decision C(2017) 4444 final…

In April 2023, a Memorandum was signed between the competition authorities of eight Member States (Poland, Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania and Slovakia) and the competition authorities of the newest EU candidate countries Moldova and Ukraine for regional cooperation in the field of competition policy. The main objective of this initiative was to promote…

Introduction Long before the Directive (EU) 2019/633 on unfair trading practices in business-to-business relationships in the agricultural and food supply chain (the “Directive”), the Czech Republic had passed an Act on significant market power in the sale of agricultural and food products and its abuse (the “Act”). At the beginning of its effectiveness in 2010,…