Chillin'Competition

Alfonso must be busy dealing with the negative externalities inflicted by my previous posts (with which he had nothing to do, btw),

It is thus my task to run the blog today. In brief, I have also inflicted a negative externality to my poor self 😦

A mixed bag of things:

• The spirit of emulation within the ECN is amazing. The endives saga is just over. But the veggie decisional roulette keeps spinnin’. A few days ago, the Dutch competition authority slapped a €14,000,000 on bell pepper and onion growers for unlawful cartel. With this focus on agricultural products, the conspiracy theorist that sleeps in me cannot help but thinking that the MS are trying to get their CAP money back. Thanks to D. Mamane (Schellenberg Wittmer) for the pointer;
• Some more results, of  EU officials this time, at the 20K: An Renckens (1:26:35); Oliver Stehmann (1:32:09); Sébastien Thomas (1:35:20); Anthony Whelan (1:50:36); Guillaume Loriot (1:52:06); Piet Van Nuffel (1:54:50). I stopped under 2 hours, as the list was pretty lenghty. Please send me your time if you want to appear on this post;
• Dan Sokol  (University of Florida and Ioannis Liannos (UCL) new book The Global Limits of Competition Law is out. Looks really nice. Chillin’Competition would welcome a review copy;
• The American Antitrust Institute has put together The International Handbook On Private Enforcement Of Competition Law. Same here, a review copy would be appreciated;
• Who monitoring trustees really are? I thought until now that they were specialised consultants. But in reading a commentary on Intel/McAfee this morning, I learned that former CEOs also make good candidates. In this case, Mr. Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, former CEO of Nokia, was appointed as Monitoring Trustee;
• Our friend David Mamane (him again) made my day in sending me a picture of today’s St Gallen competition conference. Apparently, my name was high on the screen (see picture on top of this post). Thanks to him, and to Tom Hoehn (the speaker), who quoted me in public;
• I was interviewed today in a local Belgian newspaper on what the concrete impact of the EU on Belgian’s daily life. A tricky question, which demanded quite some thinking. See the result here: Sudpresse – 7 juin 2012;
• Turning to less serious press, I was quoted in the LA Times on the Google case. From what I read, I disagree with Dennis Oswell (Oswell and Vahida). To me, the Commissioner’s move sends the signal that COMP’s case is weak.  In line with past practice, the Commission could have simply requested a settlement behind closed doors it if it had had a strong case.  My best scientific explanation of why the Commission departed from conventional practice? => it is trying to play some sort of poker game: with strong hands, try to look weak; with weak hands, try to look strong. And BTW, Regulation 1/2003 does not entitle the Commission to formally request Article 9 commitments. They must be proposed by the parties.