Chillin'Competition

[There are too many things going on this week on which we would like to comment (not least yesterday’s record fine in the CRT cartel) and we hear that next week may be even more interesting… We had another post planned for today, but current news rule,  and we wanted to provide you with the first comment of today’s Judgment in AstraZeneca. So, here’s a subjective and hastily written summary + comments. It might be a living-post, meaning that it might be updated as further thoughts come to mind. Anyone who might want to use this to draft client alerts: please consider this as a Sint Nicholas gift 😉 ] 

It could make sense to hold a ménage à trois discussion on this Judgment; candidates are welcome…

Today the European Court of Justice (“ECJ”) issued its long-awaited Judgment in the AstraZeneca (“AZ”) case. The ECJ has upheld the 2010 Judgment from the General Court, which in turn had endorsed the Commission’s 2005 infringement decision.

Background

As most of you know, the Commission had found that AZ abused its dominant position by (a) making misleading representations to patent offices of several Member States with a view to extending the period of patent protection for its product Losec (an omeprazole-based medicinal product used in the treatment of gastrointestinal conditions); and (b) requestintg the deregistration of market authorisations for Losec capsules in Denmark, Norway and Sweden. These conducts were ultimately aimed at keeping manufacturers of generic products at bay, as well as at preventing parallel trade.

In 2010 the General Court dismissed most of AZ’s arguments, but reduced the fine from € 40.25 million to € 12.25 million on the grounds that the Commission had not proved that AZ’s conduct had prevented parallel imports of Losec in Norway and Denmark. AZ appealed this Judgment, and in doing so brought before the ECJ some issues which are of crucial relevance to the very notion of abusive conduct.

Today’s Judgment

– Market definition is discussed in paras. 31-60. I had started to summarize it, but it would take too long. Unless you represent AZ you can skip (lots of factual stuff, there’s nothing that will rock your world)

– The first abuse

The logic in the GC’s Judgment was that AZ deliberate (intention plays a key role here) submission of misleading information to public authorities with a view to obtaining the grant of an exclusive right to which it was not entitled falls outside the scope of competition on the merits, and therefore within the category of abusive conduct.

AZ and EFPIA argued that AZ had simply failed to disclose to patent offices its bona fides and allegedly reasonable interpretation of the patent rules, and that this could not be equated with “objective misleading”. In their view, even if AZ’s interpretation ultimately proved wrong, it was not aimed at misleading. The applicants claimed that pursuant to the GC’s standard, dominant companies would have to be infallible in their dealings with regulatory authorities, which, in turn, would impede and delay patent applications in the EU. [i.e. the basic trick of trying to scare the Court alleging that hell will break loose; as if it had since the Decision was issued in 2005….]

The ECJ’s Judgment -like the GC’s-  is solidly grounded on Hoffman la Roche’s rather unhelpful definition of  abuse as conduct different from “competition on the merits”. It does not require the abusive conduct to flow directly from the exercise of the undertaking’s dominanat position; on the contrary, it assumes that the presence of a dominant company already implies that the degree of competition in a market is hindered (the clearest formulation of this idea appears in para. 150, with respect to another ground of appeal), and that therefore it has a special responsibility to ensure that competition is nor further undermined.

The ECJ does a good job in setting out the objective reasons why AZ’s conduct was consciously motivated by the desire to mislead public authorities in order to maintain its dominant position (see paras. 79-93). The Court notes in paras. 94-100 that if AZ’s interpretation had been reasonable (as AZ claimed), then it should have disclosed the relevant information informing its interpretation (the Judgment doesn’t put it this way, but the idea seems to be that the intentional failure to disclose that info provides a valuable indication of the merits that AZ seemed to attribute to its own reasoning). Para 98 makes it clear that even if you have a “legally defensible interpretation” this is not excuse resorting to highly misleading representations with the aim of leading public authorities into error.

In para 99 the Court responds to the “hell will break loose argument” (see my second word crossing above) stating that the GC did not require infallibility in patent applications (“it thus cannot be inferred from that Judgment that any patent application made by such an undertaking which is rejected on the grounds that it does not satisfy the patentability criteria automatically gives rise to liability under Article 102“), and that the Judgment is confined to the specific circumstances of the case. There’s a difference between requiring infalibility and reprehending someone who obviously and intentionally fails to act right.

The Court then deals with the argument that AZ’s conduct (its apliccation for SPCs) was labelled as abusive regardless of its lack of effects. It states that the “examination by  the General Court is not in any way based on the assumption that the practice in question constitutes an abuse in itself regardless of anticompetitive effects” (para. 106). The ECJ confirms that AZs misleading interpretations were liable to lead the public authorities to grant it a right to which it was not entitled, and that this in fact happened in several Member States (paras. 107 and 108). In para. 110 the Court makes it clear that even if the effects of the abuse were also felt at a period in which AZ was not dominant anymore, this is irrelevant for the assessment of the legallity of a practice carried out while AZ was dominant. The Court also upholds the GC’s conclusion that AZ did not achieve its goal in some Member States its conduct was “very likely to result in the unlawful SPCs” (para. 111).

The ECJ makes it cleat that in Art 102 cases there is no “requirement that current and certain anticompetitive effects be shown“. Citing para. 64 of TeliaSonera the ECJ states that “although the practice of an undertaking in a dominant position cannot be characterised as abusive in the absence of any anti-competitive effects on the market, such an effect does not necessarily have to be concrete, and it is sufficient to demonstrate that there is a potential anti-competitive effect” (para. 112) (unlike in TeliaSonera, there is no reference to the exclusion of “as efficient competitors”, but this is probably due to the different factual settings in the two cases).

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