A View from Constantine Cannon’s London Office

By Ana Rojo Prada and Richard Pike

The European Commission has announced that it has imposed fines totaling 19.48 million euros on five European envelope producers for coordinating prices and allocating customers through an anticompetitive cartel.

The Commission imposed fines on the five companies – Bong (of Sweden), GPV and Hamelin (both of France), Mayer-Kuvert (of Germany) and Tompla (of Spain) – after they agreed to a settlement that required them to acknowledge their participation in the envelope cartel and their liability for violating European Union antitrust rules.

The Commission found that from October 2003 to April 2008 the cartel allocated customers and coordinated prices for standard/catalogue and special printed envelopes.  The companies’ high-level executives met at multilateral and bilateral meetings at which they arranged for their companies to exchange commercially sensitive information and to coordinate prices that they offered to major European customers.

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A View from Constantine Cannon’s London Office

By Yulia Tosheva and James Ashe-Taylor

The European Commission has signalled that it is not dialing down its scrutiny of the telecommunications sector by imposing fines totalling 70 million euros on Slovak Telekom and its parent company, Deutsche Telekom.

On October 15, 2014, the Commission imposed a fine of 38,838,000 euros on Slovak Telekom and Deutsche Telekom for pursuing an abusive strategy designed to exclude competitors from the Slovak market for broadband services for more than five years. Deutsche Telekom was held to be jointly and severally liable for the amount of the fine as it had exercised decisive influence over Slovak Telekom during the period of the infringements.

Deutsche Telekom also received an additional fine of 31,070,000 euros for its recidivist behaviour, based on its record of having been fined by the Commission in 2003 for a margin squeeze in the German broadband market.

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A View from Constantine Cannon’s London Office

By Ana Rojo Prada and James Ashe-Taylor

The European Commission has settled two cartel investigations and sanctioned four major banks in the Swiss Franc-related derivatives market, imposing total fines of approximately 94 million euros, for violations of European Union antitrust rules.

Interest rate derivatives (including swaps, futures and options) are financial products used by banks or companies as insurance mechanisms to manage the risk of interest rate fluctuations.

The first cartel investigation settlement involved collusive behaviour between the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and JPMorgan between March 2008 and July 2009.  The cartel sought to influence the Swiss Franc Libor benchmark interest rate as a means of distorting the pricing of the derivatives indexed on it.  The cartel engaged in discussions concerning one of the bank’s future Swiss Franc Libor rate submissions and exchanged information on trading positions and intended prices.

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A View from Constantine Cannon’s London Office

By Irene Fraile and Richard Pike

The recent judgment by the European Court of Justice (“ECJ”) in the MasterCard case is sparking a lively debate about how antitrust enforcement of payment system regimes should evolve in the European Union, as evidenced by an antitrust seminar co-sponsored by Constantine Cannon in Brussels on Monday.

The ECJ’s MasterCard judgment was rendered on September 11, 2014, when it dismissed MasterCard’s final appeal against an antitrust infringement decision adopted by the European Commission in 2007 regarding MasterCard’s Multilateral Interchange Fees (“MIFs”) for cross-border payment card transactions. MIFs are the fees paid by merchants’ banks to card-issuing banks to cover the cost of processing card payments. The ECJ held that the level of those fees had “restrictive effects on competition.”

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A View from Constantine Cannon’s London Office

By James Ashe-Taylor and Ana Rojo Prada

Debate continues over Google’s settlement offer in search and advertising investigation as European Commission indicates that more is needed.

Google and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp have traded blows publicly following comments by the European Commission indicating that it would reopen its antitrust investigation into Google’s search and advertising business.

Outgoing Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia has indicated in interviews over the last week that Google’s proposals to settle the investigation do not fully address the Commission’s concerns.

In an open letter to Almunia, News Corp Chief Executive Robert Thomson called Google “a platform for piracy and malicious networks.”  He also alleged that Google deliberately made it difficult to “access information independently and meaningfully,” and that its sudden changes to the ranking and display of search results prejudiced small companies.

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