It has been just over a year since I last wrote on EU Merger Control and the Innovation Theory of Harm (the ITOH), see here. And what a year it has been. We still have no real idea what Brexit means. We still do not know who will win the World Cup this year, but…
‘Product hopping’, or ‘evergreening’, are expressions used (by antitrust authorities and industry respectively) to describe strategies employed by pharmaceutical companies to protect sales of a successful drug on the verge of losing patent protection. For example, a pharmaceutical company might introduce a new formulation of the drug before it faces significant competition from a generic…
As 2018 and Father Christmas approach, it is important to remember that there will be those in Copenhagen next month more interested in dominant market presence than Christmas market presents. To the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC), which will meet in Denmark’s capital on 7 December for their 33rd Ordinary Plenary Meeting,…
Complex transactions are subject to an increased level of antitrust scrutiny by competition authorities. This often results in extended waiting periods between signing and closing – it can nowadays be one year or even longer before the parties are able to implement the deal. For the acquiring company it is often important to start planning…
In the European Union, Big Pharma has been operating with a target on its back for the best part of the last decade. Eight years after the conclusion of the 2008 pharmaceutical sector inquiry, it is clear that the Commission has largely been true to its stated enforcement priorities. However, the recent announcement of an…
We live in a rapidly changing world. The monikers of change are well known to all of us. Trump. Brexit. Eddie Jones. The future is unpredictable. As Joe Cocker sang, “who knows what tomorrow brings”? But let’s climb aboard Elon Musk’s innovative SpaceX Falcon 9 for a moment. Let me take you to another world….
Recent months have seen a surge of new initiatives by European antitrust enforcers applying competition law rules to holders and processors of “big data.” Big data often is described as the accumulation of a significant volume of different types of data, produced at high speed from multiple sources, whose handling and analysis might require new…
We have recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the EU Merger Regulation, which came into force on 21 September 1990. Since that date, we have seen an exponential growth in merger control notifications at the European level – at least up until the financial crisis that began in 2008. The good news is that, to…
The Polish Competition Authority, which is the President of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (the “PCA”), has announced that, starting from 1 September 2015, it will be issuing statements of objections to undertakings and will set up an internal evaluation committee. These new tools are, in PCA’s own words, designed to “strengthen procedural…
Last week, the Council gave itself another shot at improving the functioning of the General Court of the European Union (the ‘General Court’). And once again, it failed. Following an already disappointing episode in March 2014,[1]Note on a missed opportunity for the administration of justice across Europe. the Council again placed the equality between member…
