THE EUROPEAN COURT OF JUSTICE GIVES IMPORTANT CLARIFICATIONS ON
CONCERTED PRACTICES
In a notable judgement of 4 June 2009, the T-Mobile
case, the European Court of Justice (the
"ECJ") gave important clarifications on
the concept of concerted practice under Article 81(1) EC.
The case arose out of a preliminary reference posed by the Dutch
jurisdiction hearing an appeal against fines imposed by the Dutch
competition authority on the five leading operators on the Dutch
mobile phone market. The judgment is particularly interesting for
three reasons.
Firstly, the ECJ confirmed that concerted practices, in this
case information exchanges, can be anticompetitive by object and
thus require no examination of their effects on the
market. The ECJ held that, for a concerted practice to
have an anti-competitive object, it is sufficient that it
is capable, in its legal and economic circumstances, of
affecting competition. The extent to which competition is actually
affected
