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…
When the European Court of Justice (CJ) delivered its judgment in joined cases FA Premier League v QC Leisure and others (C-403/08) and Karen Murphy v Media Protection Services (C-429/08) (Murphy), it was deemed a radical game-changer for the way in which sports media rights are sold in the EU. The doom and gloom scenario…
The Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (“COMESA”) is a supranational organisation with 19 Member States: Burundi, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Namibia, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sudan, Swaziland, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The COMESA Competition Commission (“CCC”) commenced operations on 14 January 2013 and implements a supra-national…
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…
Earlier today I read remarks delivered by European Commission competition head Joaquin Almunia in Brussels on the topic of cartel enforcement (see: Fighting against cartels: A priority for the present and for the future). He discussed, among other things, recent European cartel cases, fines achieved, cartels in innovation and fast moving markets and recent detection…
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…
By Marcel Meinhardt and Frank Bremer, Lenz & Staehelin, Switzerland On November 18, 2013, the Swiss Competition Commission (ComCo) closed proceedings without further action against a Swiss individual with a formerly controlling stake in companies investigated for a possible abuse of a dominant position under the Swiss Cartel Act (CartA). The decision clarifies the applicability…
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 February 11, 2014, the Canadian government included in its federal budget a proposed amendment to the Competition Act to prohibit unjustified price discrimination to reduce the gap between consumer prices in Canada and the United States. The Minister of Finance made clear that the Commissioner of Competition, the head of Canada’s Competition Bureau, would…
On February 3, 2014, the Federal Court of Appeal overturned the Competition Tribunal’s 2013 decision dismissing the Commissioner of Competition’s abuse of dominance allegations against the Toronto Real Estate Board (TREB) and referred the case back to the Tribunal. In so doing, the Court held that the Competition Act’s abuse of dominance provisions could potentially…
