EU and Competition Law

The ECJ wrote the epilogue to the Illumina/Grail saga, overturning the EC’s novel ‘Article 22’ approach. It is now clear that the EC cannot accept referral requests to review transactions that fall below the thresholds of national merger control regimes.

The Foreign Subsidies Regulation has celebrated one year of its application. Time for companies to take stock of the lessons learnt from key developments of this first year. However, ambiguities remain and more is yet to come. Watch this space!

In recent cases in the fire protection and private security sectors, the Belgian Competition Authority has made the prosecution of bid-rigging one of its top priorities, imposing hefty fines on infringers for their participation in cartel schemes.

Tom Verdonk has co-edited the book ‘Unfair Trading Practices in the Agricultural and Food Supply Chain’, recently published by Larcier-Intersentia.

The Belgian Competition Authority has applied the Towercast case law in a first case in Belgium. It could possibly try do so again for certain hospital mergers that the legislator has recently exempted from merger filing in Belgium.

Patent settlement agreements between originator pharmaceutical companies and generics manufacturers are a risky business. Originator medicine company Servier and five generic companies rolled the dice and the ECJ largely confirmed their antitrust fines.

The Commission’s fight to avoid paying interest to Deutsche Telekom is over. The ECJ upheld the right of companies to receive interest on unduly collected antitrust fines, carrying a hefty price tag for the Commission.