Category Archives: private enforcement

Almunia: EU Antitrust damages directive “most significant”

Posted on by under cartels, class action, conference, EU, legislation, policy, private actions, private enforcement

St. Gallen International Competition Law Forum Remarks Highlight Civil Competition-Law Enforcement & Cartel Victims’ Access to Evidence as Top-of-Agenda for Outgoing Commissioner

Joaquin ALMUNIA, Vice President of the European Commission responsible for Competition policy & enforcement, made the following (excerpted) remarks at the 2014 International Competition Law Forum held in St. Gallen.

From a practitioner’s perspective, the Commissioner’s emphasis on cartel victims’ access to evidence, his subtle reminder that the Directive merely sets a “minimum standard“, and the parallel observation that the upcoming collective redress Recommendation will be applicable across all policy (and legal) fields are important highlights of the prepared remarks.

I will start with the Directive on antitrust damages actions, which I regard as one of the most significant developments in the competition-policy domain in the current mandate.

Infringements of EU competition law are not only bad for the competitiveness of our economy. They also harm companies and consumers directly.

We recognise that every individual consumer and business has the right to be compensated for this damage. However, given the legal systems of EU countries, only a few victims obtain compensation in practice.

The time has come to translate our principles into actual practice.

Last year the Commission tabled a proposal to remove existing obstacles in national rules and make it easier for victims to obtain compensation across the EU through private enforcement.

The European Parliament and the Council have seized the opportunity and reached a political agreement with remarkable speed.

The Parliament voted the final text by an overwhelming majority, and the formal approval by the Council is expected before or shortly after the summer.

This outcome is a major success for a number of reasons.

First, from the perspective of victims, the Directive will make it easier for them to get hold of the evidence they need to prove the damage, because national courts will be empowered to order disclosure of relevant evidence.

The Directive also allows victims to rely on decisions taken by national competition authorities when these find an infringement.

Moreover, it introduces clear rules on several aspects of competition litigation, thus reducing the existing uncertainties, which have a cost for all parties.

From the perspective of the internal market, the Directive sets a minimum standard in all Member States, which means more legal certainty and a more level playing field throughout the EU.

Finally, from the perspective of competition authorities, the Directive fine-tunes the interaction between their work and the compensation claims by private parties. This is thanks to rules that preserve the incentives of companies to cooperate in antitrust investigations.

In parallel to the Directive, the Commission has also adopted a Recommendation inviting Member States to introduce collective redress mechanisms at national level by mid-2015.

The Recommendation includes basic principles that would ensure fair, timely and affordable procedures across the EU. The Recommendation is not limited to competition law but covers all policy fields.

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On the wrong side of the tracks: German BKartA Cartel Office fines rail makers anew to tune of EUR 97m

Posted on by under private enforcement, Uncategorized

The Bundeskartellamt (German Federal Cartel Office) has determined once again that German rail producers have been on the wrong side of the tracks & spent too much time in a bad neighbourhood, so to speak.

This time around, the eight players in the rail business were fined for a separate, but related, heavy-industry cartel that was targeted at short-haul local/communal German rail customers.

In the first round of the massive investigation — initiated by the leniency application of cartelist Voestalpine — the target had been the federal Deutsche Bahn.  In that case, the FCO imposed total fines of EUR 134.5 million against 4 participants in the illegal agreements.

What’s the total FCO cost of this train ticket?  Almost 1/4 billion Euros, if you include both cartels.  And that’s just the BKartA fines.  Let’s see where the private damages litigation will head, with Deutsche Bahn leading the pack in all likelihood.

Draft E.U. Commission paper on private antitrust damages leaked?

Posted on by under class action, EU, private enforcement

Final Commission guidance on private AT actions imminent?

BusinessWeek’s Stephanie Bodoni reports that Bloomberg has obtained “draft plans” by the European Commission to level the playing field across Europe when it comes to private damages actions (often follow-on cases, but also conceivably stand-alone claims) brought by plaintiffs in the national courts of the E.U. member states.

According to the report, the draft “stop[s] short of forcing nations to allow group lawsuits,” thereby evading the tricky question whether or not to “import” U.S.-style class actions or the less-drastic collective-action mechanism of some E.U. members states (e.g., the UK, NL).

It’s about time.

Any such paper, if real, has been in the making for years, given the history of the E.U. Commission’s (lackluster, because so delayed?) efforts in this regard. The Green Paper came out in 2005, the subsequent White Paper in 2008. We’re now 5 years into … nothing.

Dutch suit against “paraffin mafia” cartel moves forward

Posted on by under cartels, jurisdiction, Netherlands, private enforcement

A Dutch district court has set what some believe may be a new landmark precedent in the area of private cartel enforcement in the European Union.

The case is what appears to be a fairly straight-forward “follow-on” civil action, i.e., a complaint brought in civil court by injured parties (or those who acquired those parties’ rights to sue) that is based entirely on a European Union Commission decision condemning illegal cartel activity within the common EU market.

My neighbors on the Avenue Louise here in Brussels, CDC (Cartel Damages Claims), had bought the rights to sue from various purchasers of paraffin wax and lodged the complaint against the “paraffin mafia” (Shell’s words, quoted by Neelie Kroes – also see here)  in September 2011. The 13-year cartel (1992-2005)** may well result in sizeable civil damage awards (Sasol’s reduced EC fine alone was 318 million €) once the procedural and jurisdictional hurdles have been cleared.  And this most recent ruling goes a long way in doing so.  The key “procedural issues” that had to be resolved first were whether all of the cartel members could be sued in the Netherlands, even though not all of them operated in that country, and whether the pending EU court appeals against the 2008 Commission decision effectively stayed the parallel civil proceedings in the Dutch court.

The court ruled in favour of the plaintiff group on both accounts, holding that all cartelists could be sued together for damages in the jurisdiction in which any one of their fellow co-conspirators has its seat [here, that would notably be Royal Dutch Shell, ironically the cartel’s whistle-blower that escaped the EC ruling with a zero-€ fine] . That is, even though purported ring-leader Sasol or any of the other [non-Dutch] alleged cartelists may not have had any operations in the Netherlands, they can still be subject to a full-blown civil lawsuit there. In effect, the ruling says that the European Union’s antitrust decisions, combined with the civil protections afforded EU companies and citizens, creates a de facto long-arm statute, reaching beyond the traditional geographic jurisdictional boundaries.

In addition, it held that a pending appeal against an EC cartel decision should not result in an automatic stay of any civil proceedings, as this would unduly curtail the fundamental right to seek compensation of injured parties under EU law.

While I don’t read Dutch — and therefore cannot analyse the actual decision of the NL royal court — I trust that CDC summarised its findings accurately, even though the company clearly has a stake in this and thus a likely bias.

** According to Neelie Kroes’s speech, the cartelists initially met at the “Blue Salon” at a Hamburg hotel bar (my home town, coincidentally). I have a feeling it was this place — it’s always fun to visualise cartel activity in the flesh, just like “The Informant” did for moviegoers in 2009…:

Blauer Saal Kempinski Hamburg