On February 3, 2022, the German Federal Cartel Office (“FCO”) declared that it will not—at this stage—launch an investigation in the area of Domain Name System (“DNS”) services.[1] Following indications from market participants, the FCO conducted a preliminary investigation lasting several months, but found that the suspicion of anticompetitive conduct in this field has not been substantiated.
On February 2, 2022, the General Court annulled a Commission decision rejecting an antitrust complaint against Gazprom, due to deficient Commission reasoning.[1]
On February 2, 2022, the General Court dismissed Scania’s trucks cartel appeal and essentially endorsed the Commission’s hybrid cartel procedure that bifurcates the Commission’s investigation into a settlement path with willing parties and an adversarial path with any hold outs.[1] The General Court was satisfied that the Commission examined all the facts and arguments that Scania (a non-settling party) brought before it afresh, and in particular, without relying on the facts or conclusions reached during the settlement procedure, which ensured a fair and impartial adversarial procedure.
On February 1, 2022, the ICA imposed a fine of approximately €10 million on G2 Misuratori S.r.l., Maddalena S.p.A., Itron Italia S.p.A., Sensus Italia S.r.l. and WaterTech S.p.A. (the “Companies”) for having participated, between December 2011 and September 2019, in an agreement restricting competition in at least 161 public tenders launched by national integrated water service operators for the procurement of meters for the legal measurement of water consumption.
On January 31, 2022, the Commission launched a formal investigation of Pierre Cardin and its largest licensee, the Ahlers Group (“Ahlers”) concerning the restriction of cross-border and online sales of Pierre Cardin-licensed products.[1] The Commission will investigate whether Pierre Cardin’s licensing agreement with Ahlers restricted parallel imports and sales to specific customer groups.
On January 18, 2022, the German Federal Cartel Office published a press release of its review of two sustainability initiatives. Only a week later, on January 25, 2022, the FCO provided further guidance for the implementation of sustainability initiatives under competition law: It concluded that a proposed agreement in the milk sector to introduce surcharges for the benefit of milk producers was anticompetitive.
On January 27, 2022, the Commission conditionally cleared Meta’s (formerly Facebook) acquisition of Kustomer, a U.S.-based Customer Relationship Management (“CRM”) software provider.[1] The transaction was initially notified in Austria in March 2021. The Austrian competition authority referred it to the Commission in April pursuant to Article 22 of the EU Merger Regulation, and several other Member States subsequently joined the referral.
On January 26, 2022, the Council of State confirmed on appeal the annulment by the TAR Lazio[1] of a decision in which the ICA found that Società Iniziative Editoriali S.p.A. (“SIE”), the publisher of L’Adige, the main daily newspaper in the area of Trento, abused its dominant position in the daily newspaper market in that geographic area (the “Decision”).
On January 26, 2022, the Criminal Chamber of the French Cour de cassation (the French Supreme Court) has ruled for the first time that companies’ internal documents summarizing or forwarding outside counsel’s legal advice in connection with anticipated litigation are protected by the French legal privilege (secret professionnel). The French case law is therefore gradually moving closer to the EU one.
On January 26, 2022, the General Court partially annulled the Commission’s decision imposing a €1.06 billion fine on Intel for abusing its dominant position through the granting of exclusivity- conditioned rebates.[1] The General Court found that the Commission had not established to the requisite legal standard that the rebates were capable of having, or were likely to have, anticompetitive effects.[2]