The Italian Competition Authority closes by a commitment decision an Article 101 TFEU investigation on purchase supercentre

An Article 101 TFEU investigation started by the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) against Centrale Italiana (CI) has been closed by a commitment decision (Case I768, Centrale d'aquisto per la grande distribuzione Organizzata). CI was formed by some Italian large supermarket chains that entrusted it with the task to operate as a purchase supercentre, negotiating all the supply contracts on their behalf with the aim to obtain more favourable commercial terms from suppliers.
The ICA believed that the CI activities might restrain competition in the upstream procurement markets, by reducing the capability of weaker suppliers to stay on the market, as well as in the downstream selling markets, by giving the parties incentives to coordinate their commercial policies. Collusion among the parties was also facilitated by the exchange of sensitive commercial information through the CI and by some bilateral cooperation agreements concluded by the parties.
To resolve the above competition problems, all the investigated supermarket chains agreed to wind up CI by 31 December 2014. In addition, Despar and Gartico agreed to terminate the cooperation agreements with the other members of CI, while Coop Italia, Discoverde and Sigma committed to terminate all their cooperation agreements, with the exception of those for the negotiation of purchases from suppliers with a turnaround in excess of € 2 million.
The ICA approved the commitments. It pointing out that by the winding up of CI might remove the likelihood of a collusion among the parties. The termination of the cooperation agreement between Despar and Gartico might have a positive effects on competition, since they had together the highest most share of the relevant selling markets.
Therefore, the ICA made the commitments binding and closed the procedure. It may be said that the parties might have seen in the commitments procedure the best option to avoid a possible infringement decision, even if they gave the ICA quite far-reaching undertakings. On the contrary, they did not play the card of the efficiency defence under Article 101(3) TFEU, which was a much more risky solution, considering that the ICA anticipated that meeting the condition of passing a fair share of efficiencies to consumers was unlikely in this case due to the high market shares of the parties.

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