The Antitrust Week In Review

Here are some of the developments in antitrust news this past week that we found interesting and are following.

China Vitamin C Price-Fixing Verdict Voided by U.S. Appeals Court.  The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit on Tuesday threw out a $147.8 million price-fixing verdict against two Chinese companies that were accused of conspiring to raise prices and lower supply of vitamin C sold to U.S. purchasers.  The Court of Appeals said the case should not have gone to trial after China, in a “historic act,” formally advised that its laws required the vitamin C makers to violate the Sherman Act, a U.S. antitrust law.  Writing for a 3-0 panel, Circuit Judge Peter Hall said the Brooklyn judge who presided over the March 2013 jury verdict should have deferred to China’s interpretation of its own laws, regardless of the country’s motives.

35 US States Sue British Drugmaker Over Marketing of Opioid.  Thirty-five states and the District of Columbia filed an antitrust lawsuit Thursday alleging that British drugmaker Indivior tried to keep cheaper, generic versions of Suboxone off the market, California’s attorney general announced.  The complaint filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania also names New Jersey’s MonoSol Rx, a pharmaceutical dissolving-film company, for conspiring to corner the market on the popular medication used to treat people hooked on heroin and other painkillers.

Exclusive: Japan’s Antitrust Watchdog Considers Action Against Apple, Carriers – Sources.  Japanese regulators are considering taking action against Apple Inc. over possible antitrust violations that may have helped it dominate the nation’s smartphone sales, government sources said, a move that could hit the company’s profit margins in one of its most profitable markets.  In a report published last month, Japan’s Fair Trade Commission said that NTT Docomo, KDDI Corp and Softbank Group were refusing to sell older surplus iPhone models to third party retailers, thereby hobbling smaller competitors.  Apple was not named in that report, but two senior government sources told Reuters that regulators were also focusing on Apple’s supply agreements with all three carriers.

Google Gets More Time to Counter EU Antitrust Charge on Android.  Alphabet’s Google has been given an extra three weeks to respond to EU antitrust charges that it abused its dominant Android mobile operating system to squeeze out rivals, the European Commission said on Tuesday.  The U.S. tech giant had been due to file a response by Tuesday, but said it needed more time and will now reply by Oct. 7, a Commission spokesman said, the third extension of the deadline.  The Commission in April accused Google of harming consumers because it required mobile phone makers to pre-install Google Search and the Google Chrome browser on their smartphones to access other Google apps.