This book provides a comprehensive account of EU antitrust procedure, exploring the powers of the EU Commission and the observance of fundamental rights during antitrust proceedings, judicial review exercised by the EU Courts, the role played by national authorities and courts and the mechanisms for cooperation in the EU and internationally
By their nature, remedies are central to competition law enforcement and represent the yardstick against which the efficiency of the overall system can be measured. Yet very rarely have remedies been treated in a horizontal and comprehensive manner from the combined perspectives of substance, process and policy. The present volume, developed in partnership with the College of Europe’s Global Competition Law Centre (GCLC), provides coherent, practical, and authoritative commentaries by leading experts from the GCLC’s incomparable network. The contributions – originally presented at the 2019 GCLC annual conference – examine remedies to assess the overall effectiveness of competition law enforcement in merger, antitrust and State aid matters. The overall topic is presented under five headings: objectives and limitations of remedies; types of remedies in competition law enforcement; implementation and process; ex post assessment of remedies and policy lessons; and national and international approaches. The high-profile and wide-ranging group of authors includes the Director-General of the European Commission’s competition department, lawyers from major international firms, and well-known economists and academics specialising in competition law. With a sharp focus on how to make competition rules work well in today’s digital environment, this systematic and coherent analysis illuminates an issue that we need to fully grasp and understand in order to make sense of competition policy, law and enforcement in the years and decades to come.
This volume provides a concise explanation of how the European Commission investigates infringments of EU competition law. It deals with topics such as the Commission's investigative powers, procedural rights of the parties concerned, and the methods for setting fines and judicial review against Commission decisions.
This new Sixth Edition of a major work by the well-known competition law team at Van Bael & Bellis in Brussels brings the book up to date to take account of the many developments in the case law and relevant legislation that have occurred since the Fifth Edition in 2010. The authors have also taken the opportunity to write a much-extended chapter on private enforcement and a dedicated section on competition law in the pharmaceutical sector. As one would expect, the new edition continues to meet the challenge for businesses and their counsel, providing a thoroughly practical guide to the application of the EU competition rules. The critical commentary cuts through the theoretical underpinnings of EU competition law to expose its actual impact on business. In this comprehensive new edition, the authors examine such notable developments as the following: important rulings concerning the concept of a restriction by object under Article 101; the extensive case law in the field of cartels, including in relation to cartel facilitation and price signalling; important Article 102 rulings concerning pricing and exclusivity, including the Post Danmark and Intel judgments, as well as standard essential patents; the current block exemption and guidelines applicable to vertical agreements, including those applicable to the motor vehicle sector; developments concerning online distribution, including the Pierre Fabre and Coty rulings; the current guidelines and block exemptions in the field of horizontal cooperation, including the treatment of information exchange; the evolution of EU merger control, including court defeats suffered by the Commission and the case law on procedural infringements; the burgeoning case law related to pharmaceuticals, including concerning reverse payment settlements; the current technology transfer guidelines and block exemption; procedural developments, including in relation to the right to privacy, access to file, parental liability, fining methodology, inability to pay and hybrid settlements; the implementation of the Damages Directive and the first interpretative rulings. As a comprehensive, up-to-date and above all practical analysis of the EU competition rules as developed by the Commission and EU Courts, this authoritative new edition of a classic work stands alone. Like its predecessors, it will be of immeasurable value to both business persons and their legal advisers.
Offering in-depth analysis of the case law currently being written in courtrooms all over the world under the so-called •patent warê, the book puts forward a new method for applying competition law to standards and standard-setting _ in both its collus
This new edition of this key analytical commentary on the competition procedures of the EU provides in-depth coverage of the relevant rules. It discusses in detail the Commission's package of regulations and guidelines and their interaction in practice, as well as the relevant case law of the European Courts.
Competition Law and Policy in the EU --Article 101(1) --Article 101(3) --Market Definition --Cartels --Non-Covert Horizontal Cooperation --Vertical Agreements Affecting Distribution or Supply --Merger Control --Intellectual Property Rights --Article 102 --The Competition Rules and the Acts of Member States --Sectoral Regimes --Enforcement and Procedure --Fines for Substantive Infringements --The Enforcement of the Competition Rules by National Competition Authorities --Litigating Infringements in National Courts --State Aids.
This book makes a significant and original contribution to the literature on the developing area of private enforcement of EU competition law. It delivers a significant, rigorous and comprehensive analysis of the transposition across a broad selection of Member States (MS) of a major EU Directive introduced with the aim of harmonising and facilitation competition law damages actions across the European Union.
"This Book is the first to empirically examine the role of non-competition interests (public policy) in the enforcement of the EU's prohibition on anti-competitive agreements. Based on an original quantitative and qualitative database of over 3100 cases, it records all of the public enforcement actions of Article 101 TFEU taken by the Commission, EU Courts, and the national competition authorities and courts of five representative Member States (France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and the UK). The book does not only expose explicit tools in which non-competition interests played a role. It also sheds light on the "dark matter" of balancing, namely invisible forms of balancing triggered by the institutional and procedural setup of the competition enforcers. Moreover, it contributes to the empirical-legal study of various other aspects of EU competition law enforcement, such as its objectives, the more economic approach, decentralised enforcement, and the functioning and success of Regulation 1/2003"--
