European Commission Adopts Revised Regime for Horizontal Co-Operation Agreements

On 14 December 2010, the European Commission (Commission) adopted new Research and Development (R&D) and Specialisation Block Exemption Regulations (BERs). The Commission also published revised Guidelines for the assessment of co-operation agreements between competitors, so called horizontal co-operation agreements.
 
In 2008, the Commission began considering how, and if, the legal framework relating to horizontal agreements should be amended prior to the expiry of the current BERs on 31 December 2010.  In May 2010, the Commission published draft revised Regulations and Guidelines.  See our previous  Law-Now for further details.

The new block exemptions will replace the existing BERs (Commission Regulation 2659/2000 on R&D agreements and Commission Regulation 2658/2000 on specialisation agreements) from 1 January 2011, with a transitional period of two years for pre-existing agreements that meet the conditions of Regulations 2659/2000 and 2658/2000.  The