Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last decade, you’ll know that private enforcement of antitrust is now big business, spurred on by the Damages Directive and industrious claimant-side law firms. Yet, one key player remains curiously passive in many Member States: the State itself. While public procurement markets are among the most vulnerable…
Limitation periods are a gating item that determines if a claim will go forward. When arguing (and counter arguing) if a competition law damages claim is time-barred, the parties usually focus on the moment the period started running (i.e. the dies a quo) rather than the duration of the period or whether it was correctly…
Introduction The Civil Chamber of the Spanish Supreme Court has already issued forty judgments ruling on appeals against judgments of the Courts of Appeal on claims for damages caused by the truck cartel. The Courts of Appeal have now handed down 4315 rulings on compensation for more than 25,000 cartelized trucks, 95% of them (partially)…
Many competition authorities would have given up on excessive pricing cases when the Competition Appeal Tribunal (the Tribunal) annulled a fine of more than £80m which the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) had imposed on Pfizer and Flynn for increasing prices for Phenytoin sodium capsules by 700-2,600%. Many, but not the CMA. The UK’s…
With a much-unanticipated outcome, on 26 July 2023, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (UKSC) finally handed down its long-expected judgement in R (on the application of PACCAR Inc and others) v Competition Appeal Tribunal and others [2023] UKSC 28, a decision that is considered to have a significant hit on the litigation funding…
On 5 January 2023, the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof, BGH) published an important judgment in relation to follow-on damage actions relating to the so-called German drugstore products cartel (Case KZR 42/20). In its ruling, Germany’s highest civil court also confirmed a factual presumption of harm in the case of anticompetitive information exchanges. This…
The judgment of the European Court of Justice (CJEU) in Tráficos Manuel Ferrer (C-312/21) provides some clarity on the compatibility of national cost rules and judicial damages estimation with EU primary law – the effective enforcement of EU competition law – and the rules of the Damages Directive. The CJEU followed AG Kokott’s opinion to…
The following is a selection of some of the most important developments in German competition law and policy in 2021. It has been a busy year for the Federal Cartel Office (“FCO”), inter alia because the new rules for digital companies took effect. The following covers cases under these new rules, abuse of dominance, merger…
Introduction On 23 September 2020 a former director of one of the North Sea shrimps cartelists was held personally liable for damage of over € 13 million by the Dutch District Court of Noord-Nederland (“Court”). According to the Court, the director’s personal involvement in the cartel qualified as improperly fulfilling his duties as a director. This…
In September 2018, the European Commission (“EC”) sent out formal requests for information (“RFIs”) to investigate allegations of an anticompetitive conduct by Amazon. The investigation relates to the interdependencies between Amazon’s third-party sales platform for retailers (“Amazon Marketplace”) and Amazon’s own online retail operations. Operating both on an upstream intermediation market for businesses (“merchants”) and…
