Italian consumer rights group Codacons has filed class action lawsuits against Italy’s two largest banks – Intesa Sanpaolo SpA (ISP.MI) and UniCredit SpA (UCG.MI) – for banking fees paid by more than 25 million customers.

The cases are the first to be brought under a new law permitting class action suits in Italian courts, and could force the two banks to pay up to 6.25 billion Euros (approximately nine billion dollars) to their customers.

In December 2009, an antitrust regulator ruled that the Italian banks charged higher fees on loans and credit lines to recover part of the overdraft fees canceled by the government in July.  In some cases the bank overdraft fees were 15 times higher than under the old system which was abolished with the aim of lowering charges.

The 25 million customers of Intesa and UniCredit who paid the banking fees can file a request for reimbursement of 250 Euros each, resulting in an overall total of 6.25 billion Euros.

The new law, effective as of January 1, 2010, allows collective lawsuits against any unfair commercial practice from August 16, 2009 onward.  However, unlike in the United States, the Italian law only allows for compensation to victims, not punitive damages against companies. click here for more »

The DOJ’s Antitrust Division has sent the European Commission a holiday greeting that appears designed to mollify the EC after a DOJ statement last month that the EC viewed as a lump of coal in its Christmas stocking.

“The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division commends the efforts of the European Commission …”  These were the opening words of a surprising statement issued by Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust Christine Varney on December 16.  

Ms. Varney was saluting the settlement agreement reached by Microsoft and the Commission in the internet browser tying case.  Microsoft was alleged to have abused its dominant position in the market for PC operating systems by tying its Internet Explorer browser to its Windows operating system.  In settling, Microsoft agreed to a five-year commitment to offer Windows users a ‘browser Choice Screen’ where they can choose to install one or more of the 12 most popular web browsers.    click here for more »

If coffee executives can’t sleep at night, it isn’t the coffee, it’s the antitrust issues.

Coffee companies around the world are working through the holiday season, contending with merger issues in the U.S. and price fixing in Europe.

In the U.S., Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc. has voluntarily withdrawn its filing with the FTC regarding its purchase of Diedrich Coffee Inc. after consultation with the antitrust regulators.  Green Mountain has stated it withdrew the filing to give the FTC more time to review the merger, and will refile the report on or before Tuesday.

Green Mountain – the manufacturer of Keurig coffeemakers – announced earlier this month that it had beaten Peet’s Coffee & Tea Inc. in a bidding contest for the purchase of Diedrich, the maker of K-cups –single-serve containers used in the Keurig coffeemakers.

In dropping out of the bidding for Diedrich, Peet’s charged that there were significant antitrust issues with Green Mountain’s successful bid.

click here for more »

Last month, the British Columbia Court of Appeal, in Pro-Sys Consultants Ltd. v Infineon Technologies AG, granted an appeal and certified a class of combined direct and indirect purchasers of “DRAMs” (semiconductor memory chips also known as “dynamic random access memory”) in class proceedings against DRAM manufacturers.  This appellate court decision is the second significant antitrust class certification decision coming from Canadian courts in recent months.  Click here for a related post.

The class proceedings at issue were brought by the purchaser of a laptop computer containing DRAMs who alleged that the manufacturers controlled the vast majority of the market for DRAM in British Columbia, they engaged in an international cartel to fix prices of DRAM during the class period, and that, as a result, it paid more for the computer than it would have but for the illegal price-fixing.  The action was brought on behalf of all persons in British Columbia who, during the class period, purchased DRAM or products containing DRAM either directly from the manufacturers or indirectly from intermediate purchasers.  The manufacturers had pleaded guilty in the United States of America to criminal charges arising out of an international conspiracy to fix prices of DRAM during the period April 1, 1999 to June 30, 2002 (the “class period”).  They had paid agreed-upon fines totaling $731 million (USD) and a number of their executive officers paid fines and served prison terms for their related criminal conduct. click here for more »

Thomson Reuters is in the news, but probably not for a reason it’s happy about.  The European Commission has opened formal antitrust proceedings against the news and financial data giant concerning a potential infringement of EC Treaty rules on abuse of a dominant market position related to the company’s coding of its real-time market data feeds. 

Specifically, the EC will investigate whether customers or competitors are prevented from “mapping” Reuters Instrument Codes (“RICs”) to alternative identification codes of other data feed suppliers to the detriment of competition.  RICs are short alphanumerical codes that are used to retrieve information about securities from Thomson Reuters’ real-time data feeds.  A subscriber to the Thomson Reuters real-time market datafeed is not permitted to use the RICs alongside a feed from another service provider.  According to the EC, Thomson Reuters has three rivals in this area and none of them have this restriction.

EC officials identified the potential antitrust abuse when they reviewed Thomson’s merger with Reuters last year, but did not act then because it was not relevant to the merger review, which only examined how a newer larger firm would affect competition.  This suggests companies subject to merger reviews by antitrust authorities should be on guard for issues that could be of concern to those authorities, even if the issues do not rise to a level that would endanger the merger itself.