The European Court of Auditors’ Special Report published on 19 November 2020 is an interesting read for a dark COVID winter evening: “The Commission’s EU merger control and antitrust proceedings: a need to scale up market oversight“.[1] In respect of merger control, the Report (and the European Commission’s Response to the ECA contained in it)…
Spotlight on Europe’s ‘strategic autonomy’ The calls for Europe’s ‘strategic autonomy’ or ‘strategic sovereignty’ have been gaining increasing traction in Brussels policy circles over the past few years. With its origins in the fields of defence and security, the idea of Europe’s autonomy has started to resonate beyond these areas, extending to foreign and economic…
The theme of antitrust in crisis is very timely for the current global climate, but more so than ever for Australia where we had already dealt with unprecedented drought, bushfires and now the global COVID-19 pandemic. Not for a century have Governments had to manage a health and economic crisis of such intensity, scale or…
When Europe sneezes…India catches a cold Investigations against big tech in Europe and U.S. have created a ripple effect all over the world, including India. The impact of worldwide investigations against big tech has intensified the sentiment of mistrust towards digital moguls. In this environment, it is only natural to make conclusions about the course…
Recently, after almost 15 months of discussions, the Parliament of Georgia adopted a comprehensive set of amendments to the Law on Competition (hereinafter – “LC”). Prepared within the framework of the EU-funded technical assistance project “Support to the Georgian Competition Agency”, these amendments are aimed at enhancing the effectiveness of Georgia’s competition framework and thereby…
What to consider a restriction of competition under Article 101 (1) is complex. However, the text of Article 101 (1) refers to agreements that are anti-competitive by object or by effect. A segregation utilized in early cases such as Consten and Grundig and Société Technique Minière. Both from 1966 and both involving the appraisal under…
The issuance of requests for information (“RFIs”) within the scope of an investigation or a merger control case can be deemed one of the main tools that enables, on the one hand, a competition authority to have a better understanding of the actual market situations as well as the nature of the alleged conducts, and…
The German Federal Cartel Authority continues its campaign against tech-giants by once again launching a probe into Amazon. This time, Amazon is not the only company affected. The authority also takes a closer look at Apple. Amazon has contracts with Apple, according to which only Apple dealerships and Amazon can offer Apple products on the…
On 28 October 2020, the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine (the “AMC“) submitted to the Ukrainian Parliament the proposed amendments to the draft law introducing new merger filing thresholds in Ukraine. The amendments have been developed by the AMC in co-operation with competition law experts from the EU and the USA. According to the public statements…
On 22 October 2020, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) confirmed in Silver Plastics that the General Court (GC) is not bound to accept a request for the examination of witnesses when it has sufficiently proven that an undertaking took part in an anti-competitive agreement. Executive Summary The ECJ has confirmed that there is…
