Access Denied: Competition Tribunal Rejects First "Public Interest" Leave Application

In a recent decision¹, the Competition Tribunal (the Tribunal) considered and rejected the first attempt by a private party to bring a case before the Tribunal under the new "public interest" test. Parliament has been slowly expanding the types of cases that private applicants (rather than the Commissioner of Competition) can bring before the Tribunal: until the summer of 2025, private parties needed to be directly affected by the challenged conduct; last summer, amendments to the Competition Act (the Act) came into force adding a "public interest" branch to the private access provisions². The Tribunal outlined the test that it will apply when determining whether to allow public interest applicants to bring cases before it.