Price Gouging Restrictions Beyond The 50 States

We continue to cover the patchwork of price gouging laws and enforcement actions brought under them, providing an overview of the current legal landscape. We are also following and will report on the application of price gouging restrictions outside the U.S. In this post, we provide an overview of price gouging restrictions applied by several jurisdictions that may be important to our readers.

European Union

While there are not price gouging specific laws in the EU, under EU competition law, companies can be sanctioned for using their market power to exploit consumers, including by price gouging. Article 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) provides that an abuse by a "dominant" business may consist of "directly or indirectly imposing unfair purchase or selling prices or other unfair trading conditions[.]" Dominance has been defined as "the power to behave to an appreciable extent independently of its competitors, customers and