competitionlaw

The Italian Competition Authority (ICA) has recently opened a II-phase investigation into a merger between two major publishing houses, the proposed acquisition of RCS by Mondadori ( Case C12003, Mondadori-RCS Libri ). The ICA believed that the entity resulting from the notified merger would have a dominant position in several markets, where the transaction would have horizontal and vertical anti-competitive effects. According to the ICA, the Italian publishing market is a mature highly concentrated and declining market where the market shares of the major operators have been stable over the past years and the successful entry of new operators is unlikely. In addition, RCS and Mondadori are the closest competitors and in many of the markets affected by the planned merger the merging parties are the largest players. Moreover, the merging parties belong to vertically integrated groups that are also active in other media markets. First, the ICA looked at the feared horizontal effect...

By a judgment handed down on 21 October 2015 in the cases 12931-12935/2015 , the Regional Administrative Court of Latium (the Court) rejected the appeal against the infringement decision made by the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) in the case I765, GareGestioni Fanghi in Lombardia e Piemonte . By the challenged decision, the ICA had penalized five firms for implementing bid-rigging practices with regard to the competitive tender procedures called for by the contracting authorities in the regions of Lombardy and Piedmont for the awards of contracts for the provision of muds depuration service for the 2008-2013 period. The Court found the ICA decision well-grounded and made it clear that bid-rigging practices constituted competition restriction ‘by object’. Referring to the CJEU judgment in Cartes Bancaires and employing a language similar to the Commission Notice on the application of Article 101(3) TFEU, the Court pointed out that agreements having as object the fixing of pr...

The Italian Competition Authority (ICA) has conditionally cleared the proposed acquisition of Compagnia Italiana di Navigazione (CIN), a ferry operator, by Moby, another ferry operator and Onorato Partecipazioni (OP), a holding company that jointly controls Moby together with L19, a private equity fund ( Case C12005, OnoratoPartcipazioni-Newco/Moby-Compagnia Italiana di Navigazione) . Though the merging parties operated many maritime links, the competition review conducted by the ICA focused on two routes, Civitavecchia–Olbia and Genoa-Olbia, which were the only routes where the activities of CIN and Moby overlapped. The above links were then identified as the relevant product markets affected by the notified merger. Considering the pricing policies implemented by the parties, the ICA pointed out that, in spite of the structural link connecting them, Moby had a 40% stake in CIN, Moby and CIN did not coordinated their market conducts. Instead, they fiercely competed with each other....