competitionlaw

By a recent judgment ( Case 4123/2015,Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato v GNV and others(Sardinia Ferries Fares ), the Italian Council of State (CS) has reversed the decision made by the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) in the Sardinia Ferries Fares . The ICA had penalized four ferry companies - Moby, SNAV, Grandi Navi Veloci and Marinvest- for agreeing with a concerted practice to increase the fares for the 2011 Summer season for a number of maritime links between Sardinia and Continental Italy. The ICA based its infringement finding on the parallel pricing policies applied by the parties as well as on the absence of alternative rational explanation of such behaviour and some contacts occurred among the ferry companies ( the CIN joint-venture set up by Moby, GNV and SNAV to bid for the purchase of Tirrenia, an ailing competitors then owned by the State, and two commercial agreements concluded between GNV and Moby). The CS hold that the ICA did not prove the...

In the Case A473 FornituraAcido Colico (Cholic Acid Supplies) the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) has closed by a commitment decision an Article 102 TFEU investigation it had opened against ICE, the world' leading producer of cholic acid. ICE is a vertically integrated firm that buys and sells beef bile to be used for the preparation of cholic acide; produces and sells the cholic acide, which is used to make the ursodeoxycholic acid, an active ingredient employed for the preparation of many drugs. The ICA believed that ICE abused its market position in the cholic acide market by foreclosing competitors in many ways: margin squeezing; refusing to supply its clients with the bile required to make the cholic acid; aggressive pricing policies in the downstream market for the ursodeoxycholic acid targeted at competitors' clients; discontinues supplying bile to firms that sold cholid acid to its clients. To deal with the competition problems stemming from the above exclusion...

By a recent commitment decision made on 3 September 2015 in the case A476 Apliplast v CONAI/COREPLA the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) has closed an Artice 102 TFEU investigation into the market for plastic recycling. The parties submitted a set of behavioural commitments which, following the results of the market test were seen by the ICA suitable to address the competition problems created by the contested conducts of the parties. Therefore, the ICA made the offered commitments binding and closed the proceedings. The facts of the case CONAI is a consortium set up by Legislative Decree n. 152/06 which is responsible for the recycling of packages. CONAI also coordinates the activities of COREPLA the consortium which is charge for the recycling of plastic packages. Under Legislative Decree n. 152/06 all undertakings making use of plastic packages have to join the CONAI/COREPLA system and pay a fees (CAC) when giving the packages to the consortium. Membership to the CONAI...

By the decision made on 29 July 2015 in the case I784 Ecoambiente the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) has fined four firms operating in the market for the recycle of urban waste for having entered into an anticompetitive agreement prohibited by Article 2 of the Italian Competition Act, corresponding to Article 101 TFEU. The ICA the investigation following the receipt of a complaint reporting the alleged collusion. It found that with the agreement the parties coordinated their behaviour with regard to the competitive tender procedures launched by Ecoambiente in 2013 to select the suppliers of a number of recycle services of urban waste to carried out in the province of Rovigo in Northeastern Italy. In this way the parties fixed the prices for the provision of the services and allocated the tendered contracts among them. The ICA based the finding of this bid-rigging practice on the parallel conducts of the parties as well as on a number of the contacts that took place between t...