Chillin'Competition

A year ago, Nicolas resorted to the series “Lost” to note that one year after the inception of the settlement procedure, no settlement decision had been adopted. That decision still took some more time to see the light: only a month ago was the first settlement decision issued in the DRAMS cartel case. It’s interesting to note that whereas one of the purported objectives of the introduction of settlements in EU competition law was to “help the Commission deal more quickly with cartel cases” (Kroes dixit), this particular case had been under investigation pursuant to a leniency application lodged 8 years ago!

Season 2: this week marked the “second anniversary” of the oral hearing in the air cargo cartel case (that’s easy to remember since the hearing took place in the same dates where Spain won the Eurocup…), and a decision is yet to be adopted. Have these airplanes also been “lost”?

Btw, in a flight to the US a couple of days ago I accidentally happened to read how the last chapter of the series ended. There was no “spoiler alert” so beware of magazines in transatlantic flights.