Competition law and State Aid rules are more often than you might think related to the world of professional sports. And now the spotlight has turned to another field of EU law. On 12 August 2023, La Liga, the national professional football league in Spain, announced in a press release that it has l...
On 29 June 2023, the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered a preliminary ruling in the Super Bock case on the legality of resale price maintenance in distribution agreements. It appears that the last bastion of the ‘formalistic approach’ once adopted by the EU Courts has now fallen. In it...
A New Approach for Assessing Alleged Abuse of a Dominant Position under Article 102 TFEU? On 27 March this year the European Commission launched a Call for Evidence seeking feedback on the intended adoption of Guidelines on exclusionary abuses of dominance, prohibited by Article 102 TFEU. Exclusiona...
Last week, on 16 May 2023, the Swedish Government presented a legislative bill on foreign direct investments (the FDI Act) to the Swedish Parliament. The FDI Act, which is suggested to enter into force on 1 December 2023 significantly expands the Government’s current powers to scrutinize foreign inv...
Increased competition law scrutiny has recently entered the employment arena. Thus, it is important to be aware that agreements between employers to fix wages or not to recruit staff (so-called no-poach agreements) could result in high fines, damages claims, exclusion from public procurements and ba...
In this blog post, we take a closer look at the merger control year of 2022 in Sweden and the cases that caught the Swedish Competition Authority’s (“SCA”) attention. 2022 in numbers In 2022, the SCA received 117 merger filings. While this was a slight decrease compared to the record breaking 135 no...
On 6 February 2023, the European Commission (the Commission) published a Draft Implementing Regulation for the application of the Regulation on Foreign Subsidies (FSR). The FSR, which entered into force on 12 January 2023, allows the Commission to screen non-EU government subsidies. The FSR requires...
In a recent preliminary ruling regarding Unilever, the Court of Justice of the European Union (ECJ) reaffirms the position taken in Intel, declaring that a national competition authority (NCA) cannot disregard claims that an exclusivity scheme is incapable of producing anticompetitive effects. The e...
In the context of the common agricultural policy reform for 2023-2027, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union adopted in 2021 a new exclusion from the EU competition rules for agricultural products. The Commission has now published a draft proposal for sustainability agreement...
The Swedish Government has recently adopted a Governmental Bill with a proposal of how the European Accessibility Directive, adopted in 2019, is to be transposed into Swedish law. The new rules require that certain key products, such as computers, smartphones, ATMs, ticketing and check-in machines,...
The Swedish courts have not been on the forefront when it comes to requesting preliminary rulings – despite a rather obvious need for such rulings in many cases where claims from one or both parties have been denied by the courts. The unwillingness to seek guidance from the Court of Justice of the E...
At the turn of the year, Sweden will take over the six-month rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union. Institutional and legislative responsibility is shouldered at a time characterised by war and economic crisis. The Swedish Precidency Program The presidency program, including the p...