When your company is raided by an antitrust regulatory agency, what recourse do you have? At first, the answer from the ECJ and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) was “not much”, as companies were not afforded the right to privacy. Over time, though, both courts have come to recognise that safeguards must be…
It is common for commercial property leases to contain restrictions on how a tenant may use the leased premises. They may, for example, restrict the ability of the tenant to sell certain types of products, by specifying permitted uses (through a ‘permitted user’ clause) or prohibited uses (through a ‘restricted user’ clause). Alternatively, restrictions may…
Belgian endives are a divisive vegetable: their bitterness delights some but repulses others. And even amongst Belgian endive enthusiast you’ll find some that prefer them raw – to maintain their crispness – while others like them cooked so that their bitterness comes out even more. But Belgian endives are no longer the exclusive battleground of…
The European Commission boldly announced its 2013 merger simplification package with the headline “Commission cuts red tape for businesses.” Nearly two years on , further refinement of the Commission’s procedures is needed to reduce the information required to be included in notification Form CO, and so shorten the time needed to “start the clock” on…
The EU’s Court of Justice has ruled (in Case C-345/14 Maxima Latvija) that a clause in a property lease, between a mall owner and a supermarket ‘anchor tenant’, which gives that tenant the ‘right to approve’ the granting of leases to competing stores is not anti-competitive ‘by object’. This means that any investigating authority/court would…
On 4th November, the European Commission published a far-reaching consultation (the Consultation) on proposals to boost the enforcement powers of national competition authorities (NCAs) and to address differences between national competition enforcement systems in the European Union. The Consultation builds on the 2014 Communication on Ten Years of Regulation 1/2003 (the Communication) but also reflects…
Any company or organisation that finds itself as the ‘middle man’ in contacts between competitors or which has dealings with such a middleman must take care, as a flurry of recent EU cases has demonstrated. Any company that directly facilitates those contacts is in very dangerous waters indeed. Cartel Facilitation In AC Treuhand, the European…
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…
If the recent Wahl opinion could have instilled some doubts about the responsibility of cartel facilitators under Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU),[1]Advocate General Wahl Opinion, AC Treuhand v Commission, ECLI:EU:C:2015:350 the debate has been brought to an end with the Court of Justice of the European Union’s…
This blog deals with the 2nd part of the FCO’s discussion paper on internet platforms: possible theories of harm and intervention of competition agencies. For the first part on general concepts please see my previous blog. Merger control The FCO explains that reducing the number of platforms may actually increase competition, due to the easier…
