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…
We all lose our temper sometimes. The trick, of course, is to get something out of it rather than drop ourselves in it. But this is sometimes easier said than done. Take the UK supermarket giant Tesco. In August, it lost its rag after it’d been fined almost £10.5m by the Office of Fair Trading…
The past decade has seen a flurry of articles published trying to make sense of the degree of control that the EU Courts exercise on complex economic reasoning. By contrast, much less has been written about the Courts’ unlimited jurisdiction on fines, which allows them to increase or decrease the financial sanctions imposed by the…
The European Court of Justice is expected to render its judgment in Premier League v QC Leisure in the next few months. At the heart of the case, lies the question whether licensing of intangible media content in one EU Member States exhausts the rights to that content across the EU. The answer of the…
Naturally, we all want change to be orderly. This is particularly true when something goes wrong and someone official has to come in and sort it out. Take, for instance, the heat stabilisers cartel case. Earlier this month, the European Commission revoked the €101m fines it had originally imposed on Ciba / BASF and Elementis…
It is often said, with good statistical records, that opinions of the Advocate Generals are to a large extent endorsed by the European Court of Justice (“ECJ”). If so, the opinion recently handed down by AG Mengozzi on May 24, 2011 – if and once ultimately upheld by the ECJ – would represent a fundamental…
We live in a world of network antitrust enforcement, to borrow the expression introduced by H. First a decade ago (here) to refer to the loose arrangements among the federal agencies and/or State Attorneys General offices presiding over the enforcement of federal and state antitrust laws in the US. This is increasingly the case on…
Managing disappointment is as important for businesses as it is for individuals. But it can be particularly hard to do if you’ve been encouraged or threatened by possible change which then, suddenly, seems to evaporate into a big wet nothingness. Take, for instance, the draft groceries code adjudicator bill recently published by the UK’s Department…
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) has issued a report analyzing the U.S. patent system from a competition policy perspective. The FTC recognizes that, like the competitive process fostered by competition law, the right to exclude provided by the intellectual property laws is intended to promote innovation and thereby benefit consumers. The FTC believes, however,…
