competitionlaw

Following a report lodged by Federalberghi, an association regrouping the majority of Italian hotels, by a decision made on 7 th May 2014 the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) has opened an Article 101 TFEU investigation against two major Online Travel Agencies (OTA), Expedia and Booking ( Online Hotel Reservation ). The complainant reported that some clauses inserted in the agreements concluded by Expedia and Booking with their hotel partners, and namely the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) clauses, breached competition law. The ICA held that the relevant market was the Italian market for online hotel reservation. This was a very concentrated market where Booking and Expedia were respectively the first and second most important operators and together accounted for 75% of the online reservations. The ICA took the view that the contested MFN clauses prevented the partner hotels from offering on their own websites or through competing platforms and other channels better rates and condit...

Following a report lodged by a consumer association the Italian Competition Authority (ICA) has recently opened an investigation on a price-fixing agreement against six regional banks active in the northern province of Bolzano (Case I777 ). The relevant market affected by the contested agreement is the market for borrowing to families for the province of Bolzano. Indeed, according to the ICA decisional practice, the territorial scope for the market for borrowing to families is mainly local. The ICA believed that the six banks, which accounted for 40% of the relevant market, agreed to insert into floating-rate mortgage contracts a clause that consistently set the floor rate in the region of 3%. Such arrangement amounts to jointly decide a minimum price, reducing the price competition amongst the parties and leading to more onerous conditions for consumers. Finally, the ICA took the view that the contested agreement might infringe either the Italian Competition Act or Article 101...

In the recent Airportsof Verona and Brescia and Airportof Groningen cases the European Commission found that the financial aid measures granted by local authorities to, respectively, the manager of the airport of Brescia and Verona in Italy and of Groningen in the Netherlands, were compatible with the internal market. Airports of Verona and Brescia was decided on the basis of the 2005 Aviation Guidelines. The measure examined was an investment aid in the shape of a € 12.7 million capital injection into the manager of the airports to finance the building of new infrastructure. The aid beneficiary managed two regional airports. Verona had a traffic of approximately 3 million passengers and Brescia of 1 million. The airport of Brescia was also very active in the cargo sector. The Commission held that the aid was granted on the basis of a feasible business plan and that the public money was necessary to bridge a funding gap in the projects. Crucially, the measures did not distort c...

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...