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...
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...
On 1 December 2022 the Swedish Competition Authority (the “SCA”) adopted a decision finding that the prohibition against anticompetitive agreements had been infringed by two undertakings in the sanitation sector. This marks the second time that the SCA has used its recently granted power to impose c...
While Articles 101 and 102 TFEU are the same as in the early days of European cooperation, the rules governing their application are constantly adapted to changes in society and market behaviour. These last couple of years, the European Commission has been more active than ever, adopting new regulat...
The area of EU and competition law is in constant motion. Both the EU legislators and courts make sure that this field of law is developing at high speed. It is therefore becoming increasingly difficult to keep up to date with the latest developments in this area. At the same time, many of these dev...
Recent Rulings from the EU Courts in Qualcomm, Optical Disk Drives and Google Android Show That Failure to Respect the Parties’ Defence Rights May Come at a High Price. In recent years, there has been much talk of ‘due process’ and of ensuring a fair and impartial case handling by competition author...
It is now a year since the Swedish Act on the Prohibition of Unfair Trading Practices in the Purchase of Agricultural and Food Products (the so-called UTP Act, Sw. ”lagen om förbud mot otillbörliga handelsmetoder vid köp av jordbruks- och livsmedelsprodukter”) entered into force on 1 November 2021....