When the EU leaders agreed on the final version of the Lisbon Treaty, one particular amendment caused turmoil in the European competition law community. The Lisbon Treaty repealed the 50-year-old commitment to “undistorted competition”, embedded in the fundamental provisions of the EC Treaty (Article 3(1)(g) EC), and moved it to a Protocol annexed to the…
The big story for British sports fans has been the recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) in the FA Premier League / Karen Murphy case. Effectively, the ECJ has said that British viewers can buy live English Premier League football matches from any pay-TV provider in the EU and…
On 13 September, the Commission published its decision of 31 March 2011 in China National Bluestar/Elkem. After DSM/Sinochem/JV (decision of 10 May but published in June), this was the second published decision which dealt in some detail with the question how to treat Chinese State-owned Enterprises or SOEs under the EUMR. The question has both…
One of the main concerns raised by the decentralization of EU competition law enforcement related to the risk of different competition authorities prosecuting and sanctioning the same cross-border anticompetitive practice, in breach of the ne bis in idem principle (protection against double jeopardy, as provided for by Art. 50 of the EU Charter of Fundamental…
The past decade has seen a flurry of articles published trying to make sense of the degree of control that the EU Courts exercise on complex economic reasoning. By contrast, much less has been written about the Courts’ unlimited jurisdiction on fines, which allows them to increase or decrease the financial sanctions imposed by the…
The European Court of Justice is expected to render its judgment in Premier League v QC Leisure in the next few months. At the heart of the case, lies the question whether licensing of intangible media content in one EU Member States exhausts the rights to that content across the EU. The answer of the…
We live in a world of network antitrust enforcement, to borrow the expression introduced by H. First a decade ago (here) to refer to the loose arrangements among the federal agencies and/or State Attorneys General offices presiding over the enforcement of federal and state antitrust laws in the US. This is increasingly the case on…
The European Commission’s Phase II decision of 17 November 2010 concerning Syngenta’s acquisition of Monsanto’s sunflower seeds business raises a number of questions. First, it took the European authorities long to decide who should review the case. The transaction was signed in August 2009 – it did not have an EU dimension and was notifiable…
Lawyers do funny things to words. Sometimes, of course, they need to create a technical term to cover something that doesn’t exist in ordinary parlance. “Tort” is an obvious example. Yes, you can talk about a civil wrong that has no element of contract to it but that’s a longwinded way of expressing yourself. Most…
In her recent Opinion in the KME case, AG Sharpston ventured a few considerations on the nature of EU antitrust decisions and on the due process requirements arising from Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) on the right to a fair trial, to be added to a growing list of signals perceptible in recent judgments of a progressive move toward a broader interpretation of the EU Courts unlimited jurisdiction and, possibly, the exercise of full appellate jurisdiction over Commission decisions imposing fines.
