When the EU leaders agreed on the final version of the Lisbon Treaty, one particular amendment caused turmoil in the European competition law community. The Lisbon Treaty repealed the 50-year-old commitment to “undistorted competition”, embedded in the fundamental provisions of the EC Treaty (Article 3(1)(g) EC), and moved it to a Protocol annexed to the…
On 17 October, the Commission published a revised version of its Best Practices for the submission of economic evidence and data collection in competition cases (“BP”). The first version of the BP, published in January 2010, included guidance on issues such as the way relevant questions in economic submissions should be formulated, choice of methodology,…
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has recently released two reports relating to the pharmaceutical industry. A significant theme in both reports is a concern that brand name pharmaceutical companies are using the threat of launching an authorized generic to make deals that delay generic entry. These reports shine a spotlight on the interplay between authorized…
Public discussion on merger control in the last few years of has put the spotlight on two elements of contemporary merger analysis: market definition and market concentration, of which the former has raised considerable debate, in particular. It has been asked if market definition has de facto become superfluous to merger analysis due to some…
The big story for British sports fans has been the recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) in the FA Premier League / Karen Murphy case. Effectively, the ECJ has said that British viewers can buy live English Premier League football matches from any pay-TV provider in the EU and…
On October 25, 2011, the Federal Cartel Office (“FCO”) fined mills company VK Mühlen AG in the amount of € 23.8 million for price fixing and customer and market allocation with competitors regarding the sale of flour in Germany. In addition, the FCO found that the participants coordinated capacity reductions. This has been the FCO’s…
On October 4, the European Court of Justice rendered its judgment in Premier League v QC Leisure. For a discussion of the background to the case and the opinion of the Advocate General see here. The Court concludes that blocking the importation of Greek pay-TV decoders into the UK restricts the freedom to provide services…
On 13 September, the Commission published its decision of 31 March 2011 in China National Bluestar/Elkem. After DSM/Sinochem/JV (decision of 10 May but published in June), this was the second published decision which dealt in some detail with the question how to treat Chinese State-owned Enterprises or SOEs under the EUMR. The question has both…
One of the main concerns raised by the decentralization of EU competition law enforcement related to the risk of different competition authorities prosecuting and sanctioning the same cross-border anticompetitive practice, in breach of the ne bis in idem principle (protection against double jeopardy, as provided for by Art. 50 of the EU Charter of Fundamental…
The General Court has rendered a series of judgments in the Dutch Beer Cartel case that involve a number of legal issues, including in Grolsch v. Commission on September 15, 2011 and Heineken v. Commission and Bavaria v. Commission on June 16, 2011. The Commission had found in its 2007 decision that InBev (which received…
