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...
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...