competitionlaw

This post also deals with the decision of the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) in Sardinia Ferry Fares (Case I743). More precisely, it dwells on the approach taken by the ICA to discharge its evidentiary burden to establish a concerted practice. In short, following the receipt of many reports from passengers complaining about increasing fares charged for the maritime links between Sardinia and Continental Italy, by a decision made on 11 May 2011 the ICA opened an Article 101 TFEU investigation against a number of ferry operators: Moby, Grandi Navi Veloci (GNV) and its parent companies Marinvest and Investitori Associati, SNAV and parent company, again, Marinvest, and Forship trading with the Sardinia Ferries brand. The ICA enquiry focuses on the fares charged for the links between the Sardinian ports of Golfo Aranci/Olbia and Porto Torres and the ports of Civitavecchia, Livorno and Genoa/Vado Ligure on Continental Italy. The ICA closed the investigation with the decision made o...

One of the most exciting news this year in the international competition law scene is perhaps the coming into life of a new supranational competition law regime. Earlier this year, on 14 January 2013, the competition law regime of COMESA (Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa) entered into force. And, a brand new authority, the COMESA Competition Commission (CCC) is entrusted with the enforcement of that regime. This post focuses on the COMESA merger control regime. The new COMESA merger law has been discussed at length here , here and here . It has been said that extensive jurisdictional criteria in the COMESA merger regulations to determine which transactions are notifiable to the CCC, the zero financial threshold and the low local nexus of the merging parties to the COMESA market, may undermine the functioning of the COMESA merger control system. Hopefully, these problems would be fixed by CCC with its incoming Merger Guidelines. However, the aim of this post is to examin...