For a few weeks now, the Czech Antitrust Office has stopped its dawn raids. The reason for this stems from the surprising decision of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg (ECHR) dated 2 October 2014 (DELTA PEKARNY a.s., complaint number 97/11). In this case, the Czech Republic was held to have violated Art….
In March 2014, the Office of Fair Trading (“OFT”) announced that it had adopted a decision finding that a leading manufacturer of mobility scooters, Pride, had illegally prevented its dealers from advertising prices online, other than its recommended retail price (“RRP”). This followed an earlier decision, adopted in August 2013, finding a slightly different infringement…
The recent practice of the President of the Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (the “OCCP”) shows that conditional clearance decisions are becoming more common. In 2014, the OCCP issued four conditional merger decisions, which is more than the total number of conditional decisions issued in 2012 and 2013. In this post we will discuss…
Co-authored by Jay Modrall and Shan Hu. The authors of this article would like to thank Marc Waha, partner at Norton Rose Fulbright, for his insightful comments. 1 Introduction The Chinese National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) has recently stepped up its cartel enforcement activities and for the first time has published non-confidential versions of…
10th GCLC Annual Conference Thursday-Friday, November 6-7, 2014 “10 YEARS OF IMPLEMENTATION OF REGULATION 1/2003: CHALLENGES AND REFORM” This conference is dedicated to Regulation 1/2003 and its first ten years of implementation. It explores the various issues that arise over the life-cycle of cases falling within the scope of Article 101 and 102 TFUE. This…
Inductive reasoning is sometimes explained by using either the ‘duck test’ (“if it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck”) or the ‘elephant test’ (“it is difficult to describe, but you know it when you see it”). In EU competition law, it sometimes…
Two unusual features of the United Kingdom’s merger control regime are that notification is voluntary and there is no ‘suspension’ obligation. This means that mergers can be – and routinely are – completed without notification to and/or approval by the Competition and Markets Authority (“CMA”). In this article, I examine the CMA’s use of its…
Just over a year ago, I wrote (rather extensively) on the European Commission’s public consultation entitled “Towards more effective EU Merger Control” in which the Commission proposed to (i) expand its powers to review non-controlling minority interests and (ii) streamline the case referral system between the European Commission and NCAs (see here). Our regular readers…
9th GCLC Evening Policy Talk Monday, September 29, 2014 from 18:45 PM to 20:30 PM The Intel Judgment and the Administrability of the Effects-based Approach Professor Massimo MOTTA, Chief Economist DG COMP Programme: 18:45 – 19:00: Registration 19:00 – 19:45: Talk 19:45 – 20:00: Question time 20:00 – 20:30: Cocktail Location: The Hotel 38 Boulevard…
On 15 August 2014, the Competition and Markets Authority (“CMA”) approved Alliance Medical Group’s completed acquisition of IBA Molecular’s radioactive medical tracer business. Although IBA’s business was loss-making, would have exited the market and there was no other credible buyer for it, the CMA refused to apply the ‘failing firm’ (or ‘exiting firm’) defence, as…
