competitionlaw

In the Case I796 GaraConsip- Servizi di support e assistenza tecnica alla Pubblica Ammnistrazione, the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) has recently opened an Article 101 TFEU investigation into the anomaly bidding practices of Deloitte, PWC, KPMG and Reconta EY. Such practices affected the tender procedure launched by Consip, the central purchasing body of the Italian public administration, for the award of a contract for the auditing of the programmes co-funded by the EU. The ICA noted that Deloitte, PWC, KPMG and Reconta EY were the only bidders to have submitted different prices for the different lots in the tender notice. In particular, none of them submitted the lowest price for the same lot. In the ICA’s view the only plausibile explanation for such conducts is a collusive strategy pursued by the parties. What it observed might suggest that the Big Four agreed who would offer the winning bid and coordinated their response to the tender notice in such a way that the contra...

In the recent decision in the Case I777 , the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) has penalized two cooperative trade associations and 14 small cooperative banks for two price-fixing agreements carried out in the province of Bolzano (the Bolzano cartel) from 2007 to 2014 and in the province of Trento (the Trento cartel) from 2013 to 2015, respectively. Under the Bolzano cartel, the parties coordinated their commercial policies by agreeing on the interest rate floor and other relevant commercial terms for mortgages. To this end, the parties exchanged sensitive information in the shape of current and future disaggregate commercial data in three ways: i) at the meetings of their commercial directors, ii) and of their real estate consultants; iii) through the Workshop ROI, which was a tool administered by the local association of the cooperative banks (Federazione Raiffeisen) for the collection and the processing of data regarding the activities of their members. As for the Trento cartel...