Chillin'Competition

As I mentioned on a previous post, for quite some time now I have been attempting (or rather planning) to finish a lengthy piece about evidence in cartel cases. Any of you weird enough to also find these things interesting –or who are otherwise obliged to follow the developments in this area- might have also noticed an increased willingness on the part of EU Courts to engage in a critical analysis of factual elements regarding evidence.

One illustration of this intermittent but commendable approach can be seen in a recent Judgment in case T-379/10. The Judgment concluded that the Commission did not have sufficient and reliable evidence to find that there had been a particular infringement (an agreement on minimum prices for low end ceramic products for the French market in 2004 by the members of an association –AFICS-).

In paras. 110-121 of the Judgment the Court motivates its conclusion, assessing one by one each of the four items of evidence put forward by the Commission. In a nutshell, it rules that (i) a third party’s reply to the SO wasn’t valid evidence because it had not been disclosed during the administrative procedure; (ii) that leniency statements by another party, given that they are contested, are not “on their own” sufficient proof of the infringement; (iii) that a chart provided together with a leniency application wasn’t enough, because it was “undated and contains nothing that might link it to the AFICS meeting of 25 February 2004 or to any anti-competitive discussions (…) In particular, the chart does not mention the names of competitors or any minimum or maximum prices which those competitors should apply”; and (iv) that yet another party’s leniency application, despite confirming exchanges of minimum prices within AFICS during 2002-2004, disputed the recollection of facts related to the specific meeting of February 2004. [Keep this last bit in mind; we’ll come back to it in a sec].

Few national Courts would have engaged in a similar assessment. The easy way out would’ve been to say that (ii) and (iv) corroborated each other and were moreover corroborated by (iii), and possibly also by (i). Since the appraisal of factual evidence is not a matter of law (however malleable this may be), that assessment would have most likely not been appealed before the ECJ. The GC nevertheless did not take this safe shortcut, and it should be commended for that rigorous approach. I wish all Courts did the same.

There is a problem, though. This sort of assessment occurs in some cases but not in others. For the most extreme example possible (I’m not aware that this has ever happened before), see…. the very same infringement!! Yep, in two other parallel Judgments issued on the same day, by the same Judges and in relation to the same facts (case T-373/10, paras. 286-296; and T-364/10, para 324), the General Court declares that that very same alleged infringement (really, the same one, the agreement on minimum prices at the meeting of February 24 2004) had been properly found by the Commission.

And the reasoning to do so resorts pretty much to the shortcut I described above; i.e. that (ii) and (iv) corroborated each other. What is more, the party that made the leniency statements that I referred to above as item (iv) actually received a 6% fine reduction for having contributed to proving that infringement (yes, the one that had not been proved in the parallel case!).

So we have two different solutions to the same exact issue. Not sure about how this gets fixed now (I understand there are pending appeals against these Judgment).

I have some friends who like to claim that no one reads Judgments anymore, but I thought that was only endemic outside the Court itself…  😉  In the Court’s defense, however, I guess this -among other things- is what may happen when the workload is very significant and Member States don’t agree on increasing resources (i.e. the number of Judges).

Have a great weekend!