Following two sector inquiries the Swedish Competition Authority (the SCA) announced in October last year that it considered the existing competition rules to be inadequate and not sufficient to ensure competitive and well-functioning markets in Sweden. The SCA therefore requested new and more flexi...
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 4 July 2023, the Court of Justice of the European Union delivered a Grand Chamber ruling affirming the national competition authorities’ power to investigate privacy breaches when conducting abuse of dominance investigations under Article 102 TFEU. Big tech firms will now have extra incentives to...
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...
Dawn raids are often considered to be a prerequisite to successful cartel enforcement. While the intrusive character of the dawn raid makes it so powerful, this also entails a risk that fundamental rights are not properly safeguarded. Taken by surprise and with the authority’s officials at your door...
Competition rules apply also in times of crisis. When society and business are faced with a crisis, it can give rise to new forms of collaboration between competitors or emergency measures by the public sector, such as state aid or emergency procurement. The measures taken by businesses and the publ...
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...
Sweden is one of the few EU Member States which does not have a stand-alone foreign direct investment (“FDI”) regime. This is about to change. On 16 March 2023, the Swedish Government presented a draft legislative bill on foreign direct investments (the FDI Act). The FDI Act, which is suggested to e...
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...
In Sweden, review of public procurement’s is rather frequent compared to many other Member States. In 2020, more than 3,500 applications for review of public procurement’s were filed with the Swedish administrative courts according to statistics from the Swedish Competition Authority. Re...