Private damages litigation is an important complement to public enforcement of UK and EU competition law by the European Commission and national competition authorities (“NCAs”), such as the UK’s newly formed Competition and Markets Authority (“CMA”). Whilst there has been a noticeable increase in private litigation seen in the UK courts, whether ‘follow-on’ or ‘standalone…
Co-authored by: Alexandre Verheyden, Bernard Amory and Laurent de Muyter, Jones Day, Brussels The European Union has a new regime for assessing technology licensing agreements under EU competition law. The new rules include a new technology transfer block exemption regulation (“TTBER”), which exempts certain bilateral licensing agreements from antitrust rules, and revised Technology Transfer Guidelines…
About ten days ago, the Council of the EU failed to reach an agreement on the proposed increase in the number of judges sitting at the General Court of the European Union. The Council thus buried ‑ and for quite a while – a proposal which could have helped the General Court reduce its currently…
The proceedings brought by the European Commission against Google are nearing a – provisional – end with the prospect of a decision making binding on Google a revised set of commitments (see here for the Commission statement and here for the full text of the proposed commitments). Independently of their merits in addressing the Commission’s…
On December 23, 2103, the Federal Cartel Office (“FCO”) published an explanatory note on settlement proceedings in antitrust cases on its website. Since 2007, the FCO has increasingly terminated cases through settlements, so the note came rather late. Unlike the European Commission, the FCO has entered into settlement agreements without a specific regulatory basis and…
The UK competition regime is somewhat unusual in operating a concurrent competition regime with a range of sector regulators. The UK’s seven sector regulators (covering communications and post, water, rail, gas and electricity, air traffic and airport operations, and healthcare) can launch competition related investigations if they have reasonable grounds to suspect an infringement of…
The FCO published new fining guidelines on June 25, 2013, which have been applied for several months now. However, the guidelines as well as the recent practice do not provide a lot of guidance. The previous fining guidelines followed a similar methodology as those of the European Commission: the FCO first determined a base amount…
Much ink has been spilt following 2 Travel v. Cardiff Bus[1]2 Travel Group PLC (in liquidation) v Cardiff City Transport Services Limited (2012) CAT 1. and Albion Water v. Dŵr Cymru Cyfyngedig[2]Albion Water Ltd. v Dŵr Cymru Cyfyngedig (2013) CAT 6. on the subject of competition litigation in Europe. An axiom with varying justification is that…
Private competition litigation is continuing to develop in the United Kingdom. The courts and the Competition Appeal Tribunal are seeing an increase in the number and complexity of follow-on damages actions, often between foreign claimants and/or defendants. In addition, an increasing number of “standalone” competition disputes between private parties are being brought in the courts,…
1. Introduction The growing popularity of credit and other payment cards among consumers has been accompanied by an increase in the regulatory and legal scrutiny of the terms governing the availability and use of these cards. One focus of concern has been on whether “interchange fees” are set and administered by operators of card networks…
