European Union

Antitrust, European Union

, (Baker & McKenzie)/ /Leave a comment

The insurance block exemption regulation (IBER) protects statistical cooperation and certain joint insurance arrangements (inter alia line slips, pools, consortia, joint binding authorities). The EU report examining the IBER’s renewal concludes it is either superfluous or superseded.  But the report leaves many practitioners scratching their heads.  The report miss-describes industry fundamentals and omits essential practices benefitting…

Cartels, European Union

/ /Leave a comment

In her recent opinion, Advocate General J. Kokott went over one of the most important elements for companies facing cartel sanction: the fines calculation method. If this specific point is often challenged by the parties, the Court of Justice of the European Union’s (ECJ) upcoming judgement Pilkington Group Ltd and Others v European Commission may…

Antitrust, European Union

, (Baker & McKenzie)/ /Leave a comment

Summary On 10 March 2016, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) handed down judgments[1]Case C‑247/14 P – HeidelbergCement AG v European Commission; Case C‑248/14 P – Schwenk Zement KG v European Commission; Case C‑267/14 P – Buzzi Unicem SpA v European … Continue reading that provide useful clarification regarding limits on information requests issued by the…

Antitrust, Cartels, European Union

(Sidley Austin LLP)/ /Leave a comment

Co-authored by Patrick Harrison and Audrey Silvain, Sidley Austin LLP.   There are few distinctions more important in EU competition law than that between the notion of a restriction “by object” – where a regulator need not demonstrate that conduct had anti-competitive effects – and the notion of a restriction “by effect,” where a regulator…

European Union, State aid

(Athens Law School)/ /1 Comment

The summaries of the pleas of the actions for annulment lodged by Luxembourg and the Netherlands in the Fiat and Starbucks cases respectively were recently published (see here and here).  Moreover, the pleas of Fiat in its own action for annulment against the Commission’s decision were also published (see here). These pleas are important because…

European Union, Leniency

(Norton Rose Fulbright, Belgium)/ /Leave a comment

On January 20, 2016, the European Court of Justice (the Court) issued a seminal preliminary ruling on the relationship between EU and Member State leniency programmes in Case C‑428/14, DHL Express (Italy) Srl and DHL Global Forwarding (Italy) SpA v. Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM).  The Court held that EU and Member…

Cartels, European Union

(Baker & McKenzie)/ /Leave a comment

Eturas runs the e-commerce back-end of 30 travel agents in Lithuania.  An administrator message to each member informed them that the e-commerce functionality allowing each travel agent to grant discounts would be capped at 3 per cent.  That message appeared in part of the system relating to “information messages”. The Court of Justice found that…

European Union

(St Johns Chambers, United Kingdom)/ /Leave a comment

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…