competitionlaw

By Article 19 of the Italian Competition Act n. 287/1990 the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) is empowered to open a monitoring procedure against the parties to a merger that has been conditionally cleared to verify the parties’ compliance with the obligations imposed on them in the authorization decision. If the ICA establishes that the parties breached those obligations, it has to fine them. Indeed, according to the case law developed in the application of Article 19 failure in correctly implementing the remedies in conditional clearance decisions has been equated to implement a prohibited merger. With a decision made on 19 June 2012 the (ICA) conditionally cleared the Unipol acquisition of Premafin (case C11524 Unipol/Fonsai ). In order to deal with the competition problems that the proposed transaction would create in many insurance markets, the ICA imposed on Unipol the obligation to sell a number of assets. And In January 2013 the ICA extended the deadline by which Unipol ...

By a recent decision the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) has found that the on-line systems for purchase of air tickets of EasyJet ( Case PS7488 ) and Ryanair ( Case PS7245 ) to be in breach of the unfair commercial practices provisions in the Italian Consumer Code. In particular, the ICA reproached the airlines to have given inadequate or misleading information with regard to travel insurance policies they offered to consumers during the on–line process for the booking of tickets. As a result, consumers were unable to take a fully informed decision on whether take out the offered policy or not. The ICA imposed a € 850,000.00 fine on Ryanair and a € 200,000.00 fine on EasyJet, considering the changes the latter made to the information supplied to consumers in the on-line booking system when the ICA investigations were still pending. The press release of the ICA is available at    http://www.agcm.it/trasp-statistiche/doc_download/4090-press-release-english-version....

The Italian Competition Authority (ICA) will investigate into bid rigging practices allegedly carried out by Novartis Farma and Italfarmaco with regard to the competitive procedures organized by some regional health authorities for the supply of a tumour drug ( CaseI770 Octreotid Supplies ). The ICA decided to open an Article 101 TFEU investigation against Novartis Farma and Italfarmaco upon the receipt of complaint filed by the Arca, the purchase centre in charge for the purchase of drugs on behalf of the health authorities of Lombardy. Arca reported that Novartis Farma and Italfarmaco appeared to have coordinated their conducts with regard to competitive tender procedures to select the supplier of the active substance of octreotid, which is used in drugs for the treatment of tumours, tendered over the 2010-2013 period. The ICA pointed out that Novartis Farma and Italfarmaco were the only manufactures of drugs incorporating octreotid and marketed with the same dosages Arca inten...

By a judgment made on 14 January 2014 the Italian Council of State (CoS) delivers the appeal on the Pfizer Xalatan case ( Case n. 116/2014 ) finding in favour of the appellant, the Italian Competition Authority (ICA). The ICA had previously found Pfizer to have abused its dominant position in the market for glaucoma medicines based on latanaprost when it deliberately misused the patent application procedures with the aim to prolong the patent protection for Xalatan ( Case A431 ). More precisely, Pfizer relied on a patent divisional application to obtain a supplementary protection certificate, thereby extending the length of patent protection for its patented drug. In the ICA view, Pfizer  acted in this way with the intent to foreclose the market entry of generics when the patent term for Xalaton in Italy was due to expire soon. Therefore, the ICA imposed on Pfizer a fine of €10,6 million. The ICA decision was much debated within the competition law community and different views ...

By a decision made on 22 January 2014 ( Case I772 ) the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) has opened an Article 102 TFEU investigation against 11 firms alleged to have put into practice a cartel in the markets for the production and commercialization of concrete in the north-east of Italy.   The ICA feared that the parties had cartelized the concrete market at least in the north-eastern provinces of Udine and Trieste by allocating clients and fixing prices in order to crystallize their market shares. To this end, the parties organized several and frequent meetings between their representatives and a system for the exchange of information through a third party, a consultancy firm. In this way the parties exchanged commercially sensitive data regarding the supplies of concrete to their respective customers. The ICA pointed out that the availability of such data was instrumental in monitoring the parties’ compliance with the agreement and necessary to a retaliatory mechanism tha...

In the recent judgment in the case T-79/12, Cisco Systems and Messagenet v Commission , the EU General Court (GC) dealt with the issue of the relevance of the market shares to ascertain the competition effects of merger operations in dynamic markets. Under the EU merger control regime, the market shares enjoyed by the merging parties are generally among the most important factors to be considered when assessing the competition impact of a notified transaction. According to the decisional practice of the European Commission, when the combined market shares of the parties are more than 50% the merged entity is presumed to have a dominant position in the relevant markets. If it is the case, concerns arise about whether the merger may restrain competition. Yet market shares are not always a correct proxy for the market power of the merged entity as reflected by the decisions of the Commission by which in some cases it cleared the notified merger in spite of the high market shares of the ...

The European Commission has recently ruled that some of the support measures granted by the regional authorities of Sardinia (RAS) to the ferry operator Saremar amounted to illegal state aid and then ordered recover of such measures. In short, Saremar had to pay back the total amount of € 10,8 million. More specifically, the capital injection for an amount of € 6,1 million received by Saremar breached state aid rules because it did comply with the principle of market investor and with the requirements for restructuring aid set out in the Commission Guidelines on state aid for the rescue and restructuring of companies in difficulty. Also the € 10 million compensation paid Saremar for providing two links in 2011 and 2012 between Sardinia and Continental Italy was illegal as it infringed the EU rules on services of general economic interest. The act by which those services were entrusted to Saremar did not set out the compensation mechanism and the public services obligation on the r...