Archive for 2011
New members of the Spanish Competition Authority
We have just learnt that this afternoon the Spanish government has appointed Joaquín García Bernaldo de Quirós as the new President of the Comisión Nacional de la Competencia (CNC), and Paloma Ávila de Grado as a new member of the CNC´s Council.
García Bernaldo de Quirós was until now the President of the Administrative Law section of the Tribunal Superior de Justicia of Andalucía. An interesting interview with the soon-to-be President of the CNC is available here (in Spanish).
Paloma Ávila de Grado was until now the director of the Advocacy Division of the CNC. Click here to check her CV (English)
Congratulations to both for the appointment, and the best of lucks in the exercise of their new responsibilities.
The current President of the CNC, Luis Berenguer (pictured above), will therefore be stepping down from the post in a few days. We will not hide now that we have been, and are, critical with some of the CNC´s recent attitudes and decisions, and in the past we have clearly stated in this blog the reasons underlying our criticism. However, now that no one can take our words as interested praising, we also want to acknowledge the many good things that Luis Berenguer has done during his tenure. Berenguer was one of the greatest supporters of the Competition Act passed in 2007; he is to a great extent responsible for the increased awareness of Spanish society about competition law issues; and he has been a respected leader of an institution whose members he has consistently supported against all criticism. In sum, he has been a good President, and as such he should be acknowledged.
Pay Tribute
A while ago, Prof. I. Goavere (College of Europe) invited me to write a short text for a liber amicorum in honour for a god of EU law, Prof. J. Bourgeois.
My paper is entitled: “Parallel Trade: Econ-oclast Thoughts on a Dogma of EU Competition Law“. Alfonso – and his clients – are fans of this paper :).
The book has now been published. It is entitled “Trade and competition in the EU and beyond” and appears at E. Elgar.
I attach hereafter the flyer.
Tough Competition
Competition is tough nowadays, even in competition law blogging!
Check this out:
Some weeks ago, when introducing “THE RAID”, we wrote the following:
“In Chilling Competition we have devoted a number of posts to antitrust-related movies (see our previous posts on: “First ever Hollywood competition law movie?”; “More competition-related entertainment“; “OFT goes to Hollywood”, and, very specially, our nominations to the “Antitrust Oscars”). Given that all of those posts received a crazy amount of visits, we can reasonably presume that you too like this sort of videos.”
This afternoon, one of our readers sent us a link to CPI´s September Antitrust Chronicle, where we see that CPI has created its “First CPI Film Festival”. Does this sound familiar?
Not only the concept “sort of” ressembles our “Antitrust Oscars”, but the films are also the same ones that we had referred to in our previous posts, and that you had referred to in previous comments.
It´s nice to know that even though CPI Blogs o´Blogs has tipically “boycotted” our posts (with one exception; Nico had already referred to this in the past), their ideas and tastes are so strikingly similar to ours!
Our competition lawyers mindsets lead us to the conclusion that there´s not much that can be done here since this situation can be regarded as either
a) a case of Conscious Parallelism (CPI) in an oligopolistic setting where CPI´s conduct can be qualified as a follow-the-leader reaction? 😉
or
b) a situation in which the content of our most visited posts must be regarded as an essential facility that needs to be shared with competitors.
We´re back
We´re back. Our holidays away from blogging took a little longer than expected, but these past days turned out to be quite busy for both of us. Nico has already explained that he´s been working on his “big book” and on bashing credit rating agencies. On my side, apart from some ongoing cases on which I will eventually comment, I attended Fordham´s annual antitrust conference in NY last week. As expected, it was excellent. In a few days I will comment on what happened there as well as on the paper that Luis Ortiz Blanco and myself drafted during a considerable part of what were supposed to be our summer holidays, and which relied heavily on the impressions and ideas conveyed to us by readers of this blog.
Some interesting stuff occurred in our absence. Amongst others, the following: as we had anticipated, on August 5th the European Commission initiated a formal investigation concerning the luxury watches market (in essence, it will seek to further investigate whether what it said was ok for companies to do in 2005 is still ok in light of the parameters for market definition in aftermarket settings laid down by the General Court in CEAHR); on September 1st the US DOJ filed a suit to block AT&Ts merger with T-Mobile; on September 9th the General Court issued Judgments in the Italian Raw Tobacco case (most of what is said on the Judgment is business as usual; the news is that the Court has endorsed the Commission´s withdrawal of the conditional leniency that had been granted to Deltafina before it disclosed the fact that it had applied for leniency to other members of the cartel). Today, the General Court has also issued some interesting Judgments in a couple of cartel cases, but that can wait until tomorrow.
More stuff that happened during our holidays: those diffuse entities called “the markets” (which in the past few weeks have been reported to be attacking my country..) kept on giving us bad news. But contrary to financial markets, the legal market for competition lawyers is thriving: on Monday it was announced that Johan Ysewyn (previously Head of Competition at Linklaters and, like Luis, Professor at the BSC) has been hired by CliffordChance; Assimakis Komninos made a timely move and returned from the Greek competition authority to White&Case as a partner. Another significant move(s) to a new entrant in the Brussels market will be announced in the coming days (it involves a couple of well-known names). (Can´t say much more; you can consider this to be an incomplete Chillin´Leak).
Competition authorities are also doing some very smart hiring: in October Miguel de la Mano (with whom, btw, I will most likely co-author a text on abuse of dominance soon) will be joining the UK´s Competition Commission as its Chief Economist while on a secondment from DG Comp. I kinda like competition authorities who (like the CC, the OFT, the Dutch NMa or the Autorité de la Concurrence) hire qualified officials even if they´re non-nationals of their respective countries. Maybe one day we will end up with a new relevant market of an EEA dimension for competition enforcers…
Reform of UK Competition Law – Again?
Our friend Kit Brown (Matrix Chambers) has sent us an interesting blog post on the proposed reform of the UK competition system. Kit is one of the most talented Barristers of his generation and it is a great honour to publish his writings on this blog.
In March 2011 the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills launched a consultation on potential reform to the UK competition law landscape. The consultation document, A Competition Regime for Growth: A Consultation on Options for Reform, sets out options in respect of virtually every aspect of the domestic regime apart from the substantive tests themselves. Most notably, the Government is adamant that there shall be a merger of the two principal competition agencies, the Office of Fair Trading and the Competition Commission, creating a Competition and Markets Authority (CMA); it is considering amending the antitrust enforcement framework such that cases would be prosecuted by the CMA rather than decided in the traditional administrative manner; it is pondering the introduction of some form of mandatory merger notification system; and it is interested in removing the dishonesty requirement contained in the criminal cartel offence. But this reform agenda comes just 8 years after the most recent major piece of competition legislation – the Enterprise Act 2002 – came into force and just 11 years after the entry into force of the most radical reform of them all here in the UK: the Competition Act 1998. An important question is this: why yet more reform?
Initially, before the consultation document emerged, many in the profession suspected that the Government would look to merge the competition agencies as part of the “bonfire of quangos” [for a panorama of quangos, see picture above] announced shortly after the last General Election; that the merger of the OFT and CC would be motivated by a desire to cut costs. After all, why have two agencies when one will do? Cost-cutting is not, however, the Government’s motivation. Instead, it considers that a merged agency will be better able to make flexible use of the powers currently available to the authorities; will be able to make better use of resources; and will become a stronger advocate for competition in the UK. In particular, the CMA will be able to deploy its powers to inquire into markets more flexibly than is currently the case – at present, the OFT may conduct market studies or (where it suspects the presence of features of a market which have an adverse effect on competition) may formally refer markets to the CC for in-depth (and costly) investigation.
Brussels School of Competition – New LLM Programme 2011-2012
I am currently trying to finalize a big book… And last week, our lucky colleague Alfonso undertook his first pilgrimage to the Mecca of antitrust events in NY. Since then he is MIA…
All this explains that we have not yet re-opened the blog.
I will nonetheless try to post a number of news in the coming days.
To (re)start, please note that the registration process for the 2011-2012 edition of the LL.M. in competition law and economics of the Brussels School of Competition (“BSC”) is now opened.
The BSC’s LL.M. programme provides (i) a comprehensive and structured teaching curriculum (+ periodic assessments); (ii) a multidisciplinary approach, with courses in both competition law and economics taught by leading experts; and (iii) a schedule that is fully compatible with the requirements of professional practice.
In its inaugural year, 2010-2011, the course attracted more than 100 participants from diverse professional backgrounds: lawyers, in-house counsel, civil servants, economic consultants and former Masters students.
This year, the programme has new features, including:
- Three clinical seminars designed to provide cutting-edge practical training on topics, such as dawn raids and compliance programmes;
- Several new professors, including high level officials from the EU Commission and national competition authorities.
Re-Opening Soon
This blog is closed until next Monday.
As an “aperitif“, please find hereafter a link to a new working paper entitled “Credit Rating Agencies, the Sovereign Debt Crisis and Competition Law“ (42 p.).
Again, a piece of heretical thinking, written in the solitary quietness of the summer.
Actually, there were so few emails in the past weeks, I really felt like a hermit.
Closed for the summer
It is time for Chillin´Competition to take a summer break.
The past few months have been hectic for Nicolas and for me both at work (we´re working on really interesting cases, books and papers on which we´ll comment in a few weeks) and on this blog (where we´ve managed to publish a post a day; this is our 429th post!)
Chilling Competition has already accomplished most of the objectives that we set at the beginning of the year, and has exceeded all our expectations in many ways. Thanks to you, we recently crossed the 150.000 visits threshold; we currently have nearly 500 visits a day, 200 members in our LinkedIn group, and more than 150 subscribers from all over the world. We´re even having lots of visits on our new youtube channel thanks to “The Raid“!
Most importantly, we´ve had a lot of fun. If you enjoyed what you´ve read too, then we have so far succeeded.
We´re committed to getting better, and for that reason we´ve got some quite interesting new projects on the pipeline that we´ll be announcing right after the holidays.
It´s a pity that we won´t be able to provide you with timely coverage of any competition law related developments that may take place in the coming days, such as the first-ever non-consensual Commission decision withdrawing an NCA´s competence to handle an ongoing case under Art. 11(6) of Regulation 1/2003, which should be out soon (you can consider this to be the last Chillingleak of the season..)
Have a great summer!
Nicolas & Alfonso
THE RAID: An antitrust movie
In Chilling Competition we have devoted a number of posts to antitrust-related movies (see our previous posts on: “First ever Hollywood competition law movie?”; “OFT goes to Hollywood”, and, very specially, our nominations to the “Antitrust Oscars”). Given that all of those posts received a crazy amount of visits, we can reasonably presume that you too like this sort of videos.
Today Chilling Competition is proud to release a true gem, a “classic” on its own right that we have digitalized for our readers: The Raid.
In our opinion, The Raid is the best and funniest antitrust movie of all times. It has everything: it is a comedy with action, romance, and an educational purpose (it was filmed -a few years ago- as part of a compliance program for Neste).
If you think we’re not objective, then you’re absolutely right:
The Raid is directed and starred by very special actors to whom we profess great admiration: General Court’s Judge Marc van der Woude (who plays the character of Luc Desmet, a Commission inspector); Toni Huopalainen (who, in addition to being the scriptwriter, plays the role of European Commission official Tom Jenssen); and our friend and favorite competition lawyer Luis Ortiz Blanco (to see a moustached Luis in his role as a priest confessing a cartelist jump to minute 20.33).
A million thanks go to all three of them for granting us the permission to digitalize their movie and for their great sense of humor.
Enough for introductions…
(Only accessible on Chilling Competition’s youtube channel via this link).
Competition sound-alikes (2)
Yesterday, we missed a big one (tx to Sarah Long for the pointer):
John Davies (OECD) 
with John Davies (Freshfields) 
Chillin'Competition 