Archive for the ‘Brussels School of Competition’ Category
Best Xmas e-card so far
A quick post.
Our email boxes are flooded with Xmas e-cards those days.
My preferred so far is Cromo’s (Crowell & Moring). Check it out, it is really nice.
Above, the Brussels School of Competition‘s Xmas e-card.
Last Call – Conference on EU Competition Law and Financial Markets
The Brussels School of Competition (BSC) and the Liege Competition and Innovation Institute (LCII) are pleased to invite you to their joint conference on 22 November 2012.
This event is devoted to Competition Law and Financial Markets (see link to programme at the end of this post). Issues covered span the emerging role of competition law amidst large scale price fixing allegations in the financial industry, the prohibition of the Deutsche Börse/NYSE merger, open and fair access to financial infrastructure, competition in credit rating services, the trade-off between competition enforcement and financial stability, the impact of prudential rules, etc.
To discuss those issues, we have invited a range of triple A experts, including EU Commission and ECB officials, industry representatives, lawyers as well as leading academics.
Programme for download: INVITATION BSC – 22 11 12
For more information, please contact Cécile de Grand Ry (Phone: +32 2 515 08 36 – @:cgr@vbo-feb.be )
Conference – EU Competition Law and Financial Markets
On 22 November 2012, the Brussels School of Competition (BSC) and the Liege Competition and Innovation Institute (LCII) will hold in Brussels a joint conference on Competition Law and Financial Markets.
Issues covered span the emerging role of competition law amidst large scale price fixing allegations in the financial industry, open and fair access to financial infrastructure, competition in credit rating services, the trade-off between competition enforcement and financial stability, the impact of prudential rules, etc.
No State aid on the menu, there’s been far too many events devoted to this topic in recent months.
To discuss those issues, we have invited a range of triple A experts, including EU Commission and ECB officials, industry representatives, lawyers as well as leading academics.
More info on the programme can be found here. The registration form is accessible via this hyperlink.
Brussels School of Competition
I had drinks last night with my good friend Charles Gheur from the Brussels School of Competition (“BSC”).
It sprung to mind that I had not yet advertised that the registration process for the 2012-2013 edition of the LL.M was opened .
There’s a bunch of new things for this third edition of the programme, not the leasts that (i) Fred Jenny stepped in and will co-teach the module on abuse of dominance, and that (ii) señor Lamadrid de Pablo has officially been drafted (he is a basketball fan) to join the team that teaches procedural matters.
Together with the fact that our studs are primarily in-house lawyers from large corporations (Microsoft, Umicore, Toyota, Mastercard, Basf KBC, Bayer, Distrigas, Verizon, etc.) this should convince young Brussels lawyers to relocate towards us instead of following the painful King’s College long distance programme.
Self promotion
We like to self promote at chillin’competition.
For instance, you will have noticed from yesterday’s post that Alfonso likes to incidentally recall that he works on a pending case against a giant US corporation.
So I take my turn to self promote a little, with a recap on recent and forthcoming chillin’competition-related activities:
- I was in Helsinki with my friend Miguel Rato (Shearman & Sterling). We were invited to deliver a presentation at the 11th Annual Conference of the Association of European Competition Law Judges (AECLJ). With 60 judges from accross Europe in the room (including judges from Luxemburg), Richard Whish, Alexander Italianer and Nick Banasevic on the podium, this was a very challenging talk. I attach the presentation here: Slides – Petit & Rato – Abuse in Technology-Enabled Markets – 11th AECLJ Conference (14 06 12. A paper on “Abuse in Technology-Enabled Markets” is in the making;
- The registration process for the 2012/2013 edition of the LLM in Competition Law & Economics at the Brussels School of Competition is now opened. We have a new brochure in which you will find a number of changes. A teaser: F. Jenny will teach on abuse with JF. Bellis, Alfonso’s existence is now official and several ***** economists have joined;
- We have a GCLC lunch talk this Friday, on the Commission’s review on the rules on technology transfer agreements. Our speakers are Donncadh Woods (DG Competition), Frédéric Louis (WilmerHale) and Paul Lugard (Tilburg Institute for Law and Economics (TILEC) and ICC Commission on Competition);
- Ana Paula Martinez (Levy & Salomao) is the editor of a new, impressive volume entitled Temas Atuais de Direito da Concorrencia with written contributions (in English) from S. Salop, E. Elhauge, D. Geradin, Mariana Tavares de Araujo, Ian S. Forrester and Francisco Enrique González-Díaz. Here’s the leaflet and table of contents: GED_LS-#845180-v1-2012_Brazil_Competition_Book
- I was in Strasbourg yesterday to lecture on IP and competition law at the CEIPI and I will be in Bruges tomorrow to give a presentation at the 8th ELEA symposium. It is a very busy week, like last week… and hopefully unlike next week.
Costs Conference – Last Call
A last call for our conference on costs next week (I have pasted below the earlier annoucement, Tomra is out).
I would be very grateful if our readers could disseminate the programme within their respective organisations.
To help clarify how and why costs are used in competition proceedings, the Brussels School of Competition(BSC) will organize on 9 May a half-day compliance seminar (this seminar was due in early 2012, but was rescheduled).
Amongst other things, this seminar intends to review recent case-law developments, in particular the recent judgments handed down by the EU Courts in the Post Danmark (C-209/10) and Telefónica (T-336/07) cases. Hopefully the Tomra ruling will also be out by this time [it is out].
In line with the interdisciplinary spirit of the BSC, this seminar attempts to “blend” competition law and economics. Under each selected topic (see agenda here), it thus brings together a team of one lawyer and one economist, who will seek to provide an integrated perspective on the issue.
This event is a joint initiative of the BSC and of the Institute for European Legal Studies (IEJE) of the University of Liege (ULg). The registration form can be found here.
Man Proc, Confidentiality and Red Little Riding Hood
In preparation for my lecture at the Brussels School of Competition last week I read a couple of Commission documents that I had not had a chance to look at: the Manual on Procedure and the recent Guidance on Confidentiality Claims. For very different reasons both of them are commendable.
- The Manual of Procedure is much more comprehensive than what I think most of us had expected (even if the non-confidential version -which has 277 pages- appears to be half as long as the original one, which according to the Ombudsman was “roughly 500 pages”). John Temple Lang deserves to be congratulated for having managed to have the European Commission make its Manual public, but the Commission also deserves to be thanked for having favored transparency when drafting the publicly available version.
The only thing I find missing in the public version is a summary description of the content that has not been included in the Manual because of confidentiality concerns. It would have been nice if the Commission had followed the instructions set out in its own guidance on confidentiality claims which state that “[f]rom the non-confidential version it has to be clear where information has been deleted“.
- The Guidance on Confidentiality Claims was not a promising document. There can be little of promise in a document whose subject-matter is the most boring thing a lawyer can do (I must confess that I started reading the doc very late at night on Thursday and was very tempted to skip it). But against all odds, the Guidance makes a fun skim read. Yep, I´m serious. Whoever wrote it has done a terrific job. The main characters of the Guidance are Red Little Riding Hood, her Grandma, Big Bad Wolf, Mr. Charming, Snow White, Ms. Magic Mirror, Wicked Step Mother, Mr. Humpty Dumpty, the Little Mermaid, the three little pigs and others. 
P.S. By the way, on the procedural front the Commission has in recent times issued not only the Manual, but also a comprehensive set of Best Practices and a new Hearing Officer’s mandate. Query: are any of these moves aimed at preempting a possible challenge to the current procedural framework before the European Court of Human Rights once the EU joins the Convention?
The vertical expression of a horizontal desire
A few days ago someone sent us a very interesting piece published by Okeoghene Odudu (who is also the author of a great book on Art. 101) in European Competition Journal (August 2011) under the title: “Indirect Information Exchange and the Constituen Elements of Hub and Spoke Collusion“.
Although we have enjoyed the substance of this article, the reason why it was sent to us in the first place was not its content but rather a particular footnote at the very end of it. It reads as follows:
“187. In his blog posting of 21 February 2011, Nicolas Petit expressed the view that there was nothing worthy of analysis in the hub-and-spoke phenomenon and concluded by writing, “The bottom-line: I will fight any proposal to organise an event on hub-and-spoke agreements. See
http://chillingcompetition.com/2011/02/21/much-ado-about-nothing/
.”
[*Note by Alfonso: The original post features a smiley face like this 
right after this quoted statement. The face is nevertheless missing in the quote that appeared in the article. It's a pity, because it would have been funny to see the smiley appear in European Competition Journal!].
However, by 24 May 2011 he seems to have had a conversion, announcing that, through the Brussels School of Competition Law, he had co-organised a seminar on information exchange, to deal in part with “Sharing Information through Intermediaries (supply-purchase relationships, distribution agreements, meet and release clauses, hub-and-spokes, etc)”. See
http://chillingcompetition.com/2011/05/24/information-exchange-in-eu-competition-law-conference-22-june/
“
We were surprised at this footnote (since we don’t always take what we write seriously, it’s curious to find out that people do), which nonetheless expresses a very legitimate opinion.
Costs Conference
A reminder for our readers: the Brussels School of Competition (BSC) will hold to organize on 25 January in Brussels a half-day compliance seminar entitled “Costs in Competition Law”.
In line with the interdisciplinary spirit of the BSC, this event attempts to “blend” competition law and economics. Under each selected topic (see link to the agenda below), it thus brings together a team of one lawyer and one economist, who will seek to provide an integrated perspective on the issue.
The programme can be found at the end of this post. In recent days, we have made several significant additions to it.
Costs in competition law – Compliance Seminar – 25012012 – Programme
Christmas miscellanea
We will be closing the shop for a few days, but there are a few things that we would like to tell you first:
- Our personal Christmas wishlists appear in a special issue from Competition Policy International. They´ve done a great job with editing our pictures (“thanks” to all those of you who have written to say that I need to change the one I use for these things), and we´re grateful for having been placed in such good company. I´m also grateful for the opportunity to do some free advertising of my family´s bakery: thanks to this they will now start seeing some usefulness to my job! Nicolas also profited from this occassion to make it (more) evident that he´s a competition law freak geek.
- Nicolas and I had some pre-holiday drinks last night together with some good friends. Not only all of us were competition lawyers, but the place we went to was also packed with competition lawyers from a well-known firm. We´ll keep the name of the firm confidential, but we can give you a hint: what do you see in the second row of the image below? ;)
- Many other lawyers in Brussels and elsewhere are also getting some last-minute Christmas gifts. Our thoughts will be with all those who, like our friend David Henry, will have to be stuck at the office with a merger filing…
- The Spanish CNC also received a Christmas gift the day before yesterday, when the names of the members of the new Spanish government were made public. The new minister for the economy is Luis de Guindos, who was the Secretary General for Competition between 1996 and 2002. The CNC is certainly poised to play an important role in the coming years as Spain makes an effor to boost competitiveness. (By the way, the CNC has joined the list of national competition authorities resorting to animated cartoons to explain their job and the benefits of competition. Check it out here).
- A reminder of some events coming up right after the holidays: Nicolas will be opening the new edition of the IEB´s Competition Law Course in Madrid on 13 January (we´ll profit from our visit to Madrid to plot a couple of interesting projects on which we´ll report right after the holidays). The BSC will also be holding a very interesting conference on “Costs in Competition Law” on 25 January.
- A light piece of Christmas reading: Freedom to Trade and the Competitive Process by A. Edlin and J. Farrell. This short article is perhaps the most insightful paper I´ve read in a long time. It´s cool to see two top-notch U.S. economists saying sensible stuff that in Europe would be received with the worst of all insults: Ordoliberal!
- Finally, we want to thank whoever had the idea of improving the search tool in the webpage of the European Court of Justice. You made our lives easier.
- To be frank, there were more issues on which I was planning to comment, but I need to run to the airport…Merry Christmas to all and our best wishes for 2012!!
P.S. We leave you with the image of the European Union´s Christmas tree:
