Kluwer Competition Law Blog

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 procedural and substantive implications.

Procedurally, the question is whether the revenues of other SOEs should be taken into account when calculating the revenues of the SOE involved in the transaction. From a substantive perspective, the Commission may need to analyze competitive effects of a combination of a company with an SOE, taking into acc [...]

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 Commission (See Article 261 TFEU and Article 31 of Regulation No 1/2003). This is probably due to the fact that for the past 50 years, such unlimited jurisdiction has been living a quiet life indeed. Over this period – and especially during the last three decades – the EU Courts have wielded this powerful tool with great caution, or at least with significan [...]

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 Court of Justice will have important implications beyond the case at hand.

Advocate General Kokott rendered her opinion on the case on February 3, 2011. She proposes that the licensing of intangible content should be subject to exhaustion in the same way as the sale of physical products. If upheld, that conclusion would have serious repercussions for the licensing of all intangible conten [...]

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 a global scale with the multiplication of bilateral cooperation agreements, supported by the establishment of connecting points or network nods such as annual bilateral or multilateral meetings of enforcers (including the ICN). Since the entry into force of Regulation 1/2003, antitrust enforcement in the European Union also operates according to a very structured [...]

The European Commission’s Phase II decision of 17 November 2010 concerning Syngenta’s acquisition of Monsanto’s sunflower seeds business raises a number of questions.

First, it took the European authorities long to decide who should review the case. The transaction was signed in August 2009 – it did not have an EU dimension and was notifiable only in Spain and Hungary. The Spanish Comisión Nacional de la Competencia or CNC received the notification on 19 August 2009. Only on 1 October did the Commission receive the CNC’s request for a referral of the case to the Commission, more than two weeks after the 15 working days post-notification deadline. The CNC argued that it had suspended the [...]

Lawyers do funny things to words. Sometimes, of course, they need to create a technical term to cover something that doesn’t exist in ordinary parlance. “Tort” is an obvious example. Yes, you can talk about a civil wrong that has no element of contract to it but that’s a longwinded way of expressing yourself. Most people recognise that professional people sometimes need specialised words to describe events particular to their world.

The difficulties come, however, when professionals take ordinary words and give them a different meaning. Take, for instance, President Clinton’s famous denial in January 1998 that he “did not have sexual relations” with Monica Lewinsky. He could g [...]