Below we cover the main competition law developments in Spain in 2023, concerning (i) institutions and legislation, (ii) antitrust, (iii) mergers, and (iv) State aid. The selection, as usual with these lists, is partly subjective. Institutions and Legislation Royal Decree-Law 5/2023 Reforms the Spanish Competition Law On 29 June 2023, Royal Decree-Law 5/2023 approving…
INTRODUCTION On 24 January 2024, the European Commission (“Commission”) unveiled its proposals to reform the current EU Foreign Direct Investment Screening Regulation 2019/452 (“FDI Screening Regulation”). This forms part of a wider package of five initiatives to strengthen economic security in the EU following the “growing geopolitical tensions and profound technological shifts”.[1] Factors such as the desire to protect…
The year 2023 was an eventful year from a Swiss Competition perspective. With the merger of the two Swiss banks UBS and Credit Suisse in March 2023, the Swiss financial market and Swiss merger control were immediately in the news around the world. However, there were also other important competition law developments in 2023. Namely,…
In 2023, almost all economic sectors were impacted by the public enforcement of competition law of the Italian Competition Authority (“ICA”) and by judgments of Italian courts. As for previous years, we will summarise below the cases that we deem the most noteworthy, without any aspiration of being exhaustive, starting from the organizational and legal…
The French Competition Authority (“FCA”) is one of the most vigorous national competition authorities (“NCA”) of the European Competition Network. For instance, it opened 333 investigations between 2004 and 2022, not that far behind the 447 investigations initiated by European Commission (see the statistics here). 2023 was not an exception, with an active fight against…
Introduction There has always been a thin line between legitimate market research and potentially anticompetitive information exchanges. Caselaw on such matters is of a particular importance. On 01 January 2023, a preliminary inquiry into several undertakings active in the light and medium class and heavy commercial vehicles market[1] was initiated to determine whether these undertakings…
Interpreting and applying Article 102 TFEU – at least in all difficult cases that typically reach the courts – requires a combined reliance on both ‘reason’ and ‘fiat’. It requires reliance on ‘reason’, by which I mean substantive reasoning about how a case should be decided, because no case is exactly like any other, and…
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) became entirely applicable on 7 March 2024. By then, the gatekeepers issued their compliance reports documenting their technical solutions and implementation of the DMA’s provisions under Article 11 DMA as well as their reports on consumer profiling techniques as required under Article 15 DMA (see here). During the last week, I have covered…
Tension is mounting among TV broadcasters and streaming providers as the German Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office – FCO) approved the plans to award the media rights on February 26, 2024 and the DFL’s tendering process will begin shortly. However, the FCO has still not decided the associated antitrust issues, which have been hovering over the…
The Digital Markets Act (DMA) became entirely applicable on 7 March 2024. By then, the gatekeepers issued their compliance reports documenting their technical solutions and implementation of the DMA’s provisions under Article 11 DMA as well as their reports on consumer profiling techniques as required under Article 15 DMA (see here). I will be covering…
