In two recent decisions, the Commission considered the impact of cooperation agreements that the notifying parties had entered into before the notified transaction and came to two different conclusions. In Iberia/British Airways (decision of 14 July 2010), the Commission was confronted with combined shares of 70-80% for time-sensitive passengers on two city pairs, London-Madrid and…
In a speech delivered last week at the IBA annual competition conference, Commissioner Almunia engaged the audience on the sensitive topic of due process and competition enforcement. Among the reasons justifying his overall satisfaction with the current EU enforcement system, he mentioned the review by the European courts, which forms “an integral part of competition…
An increasing number of voices are claiming that the Commission’s enforcement policy under the ECMR is becoming too lenient. At the end of last year, two Commission officials, Mr. Parplies and Mr. Maier-Rigaud, published a detailed study on the drop in enforcement decisions (prohibitions, approvals with conditions and termination of merger agreements resulting from the…
In my last post, I discussed the General Court’s findings on market definition and dominance analysis in its AstraZeneca judgment. In this post, I review the Court’s findings on abuse. In its decision, the Commission held that Astra had abused its dominant position (1) by providing patent authorities misleading launch date information when applying for…
In my last post, I focused on a procedural element of the Commission’s Microsoft/Yahoo! decision. The decision is also very interesting from a substantive point of view, and shows the Commission’s determination to investigate the transaction in some detail, even though on the face of it (as the Phase I clearance subsequently confirmed), it raised…
The Commission’s recent decision approving Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo!’s Search Business (including internet search and search advertising) contains an interesting application of the definition of a concentration under the Merger Regulation. In December 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo entered into a License Agreement and a Search and Advertising Services and Sales Agreement. Microsoft will acquire a…
On March 11, 2010, the Court of Justice of the European Union (the “ECJ”) rendered a judgment (preliminary ruling) in response to two State aid questions referred to it by the French Conseil d’État (France’s highest administrative Court). The case involves French book and media exporter Centre d’exportation du livre français (CELF), which received non-notified…
On 6 July 2010, the General Court rejected Ryanair’s appeal against the Commission’s 2007 prohibition of its hostile take-over of rival Irish airline Aer Lingus. On the same day, the Court also issued a much shorter judgment in Case T-411/07, and rejected an Aer Lingus appeal against a Commission decision, which refused to order Ryanair…
Some statistics to feed the debate on the checks and balances of the EU antitrust enforcement system: any comments? (click on “read more” to get the formatting right) Cartel Cases Adjudicated by the General Court 1995-2005 (226) 2006-2009 (56) Full annulment 6% (14) 16% (9)* Partial annulment and/or reduction in fines 56% (127) 27%…
On Friday 2nd July, Monty Widenius, founder of open source database company MySQL, owned by Sun, filed an appeal against the European Commission’s unconditional clearance of the merger between Oracle and Sun Microsystems. The main affected area in this case was the database market. This market is highly concentrated with the three main proprietary database…
