competitionlaw

Resale price maintenance agreements (RPM) are generally considered as hard-core competition restraints that should attract a financial penalty. Therefore, firms that put into practice RPM may not have the chance to have the ensuing competition investigations opened against them closed by a commitment decisions. Nonetheless,  it seems that competition authorities may be ready to apply the commitment procedure also to serious competition infringements like RPM, as reflected by two recent decisions made by the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) in PhotovoltaicInverter (case I766) and in Enervit (case I718). In these cases the ICA opened two Article 101 TFEU investigations regarding RPM affecting, respectively the photovoltaic industry in Photovoltaic Inverter and the sport integrator market in Enervit. The manufacturers alleged to have carried out a RPM in those cases submitted a set of commitments to address the competition concerns raised by the ICA. Interestingly, on the b...

The long-lasting battle between Ryanair and Aer Lingus did not end with the 2013 judgment of the UK Competition Commission (CC) . However, this judgment  illustrates how competition law can be strategically used by firms to take initiative to protect their commercial interests that under company law they may not be allowed to take. In short, the first attempt of Ryanair  to buy Aer Lingus in 2006 was blocked by the European Commission, which also prohibited a latter attempt in 2013 . In the meantime, the Ryanair stake in Aer Lingus grew up to 29,8%. Believing that a large shareholding of a fierce rival such as Ryanair may harm its commercial interests, Aer Lingus asked first the Commission and then the EU General Court to force Ryanair to sell its shares. Those applications were eventually rejected. The General Court ( case T-411/07 ) ruled that a 29% stake constituted a minority shareholding. Therefore the Ryanair acquisition of it did not fell within the concept of conc...

I recently published an article about the possible role of EU merger control regime to regulate ‘too big to fail banks’. Apparently, financial supervision is the optimal solution to regulate too big to fail banks in spite of some problems that may the effectiveness of this strategy. This article, however, deals with the issue whether the EU merger control regime can be successfully employed to regulate too big to fail banks by way of preventing the creation of such large financial players. To this end, the article propounds the idea of a ‘merger control approach’. This is a framework under which the European Commission should integrate the appraisal of competition impact of banking mergers pursuant to EC Regulation 139/2004 with taking into account the systemic role that the merged bank may have and which impact such role may have on competition. In that regard, the article argues that a merger resulting in the creation of a too big to fail bank may restrain competition, though it s...

Upon receipt of  a report, by a decision made on 3 April 2014 the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) has opened an investigation against five manufactures of polyurethane foams ( Case I776 Polyurethane Foams ). The ICA feared that the parties may have cartelized the market for the production and sale of polyurethane foams in the shape of arrangements having as object market sharing and coordination of pricing policies. According to the report, the parties implemented the cartel by exchanging sensitive information or agreeing on the prices to apply to customers. The complainant also reported that the parties agreed to charge higher prices on customers that bought their requirements from firms other than their usual suppliers. In the ICA view, this practice may foreclose competitors of the parties, preventing customers  from shifting to them. The Polyurethane Foams case seems to confirm the current proactive enforcement policy of the ICA that, under the new chairmanship, o...