Spring Meeting - 5 April 2006
Private Enforcement: The next meeting of the Scottish Competition Law Forum will take place on 5 April and will be focusing on the Commission’s Green Paper on Competition Damages. The Forum will be fortunate in having Mr Donnacadh Woods and Neil Dryden as principal speakers. Mr Woods is the leader of the Commission team who drafted the Green Paper and Mr Dryden is an Associate Director in NERA’s European Competition Policy Practice.
If you are interested in contributing or if you know of someone who you consider might have useful experiences and views on private enforcement that would be interested in sharing these with the Forum at this event please let us know.
The meeting will provide an opportunity for the members and interested parties to meet up and also to pick up on any thoughts you might have following the January event where the Chief Executive and the Chairman of the OFT, John Fingleton and Philip Collins were speaking.
The meeting will take place in Glasgow at the offices of Maclay Murray & Spens and will commence at 6 pm. The discussion will be followed by a drinks reception. Further details will be circulated closer to the date.
Please let me know if you are interested in attending.
Private enforcement of competition law in the EU - Background
In the US it has long been the case that corporate victims of serious anti-competition acts could obtain damages. Every year there are far more US civil cases than public prosecutions launched by the Justice Department and the States combined. In Europe by contrast there have only been 28 cases in total between 1958 to date in which a court has awarded damages.
It could be argued that the EU should avoid taking any steps to develop its litigation systems for fear of a US style “compensation culture” litigation. The point forcefully made by a number of commentators and the Commission is that the current position results in significant under-enforcement and under-deterrence. They further argue that it should be possible to provide greater justice for corporate and consumer victims of serious anti-competitive acts without creating a US style “Tort machine”.
The point made in the Ashurst Report compiled for the Commission on the state of competition litigation in Europe is that the law on competition damages was in a “state of serious underdevelopment. Very few cases were being heard, and there are apparently significant legal barriers and doubts as to how cases might proceed. In most jurisdictions it is unclear how defendant evidence can be obtained; whether or not many classes of claimants can sue and even whether interest is permitted on damages. In addition, there appears to be significant confusion as to how damages should be calculated both within jurisdictions as well as across all 25 Member States.
In such a state of underdevelopment in which parties who have suffered at the hands of a cartel or a dominant firm have no effective remedy at law, the Commission and the Member States should be able to look at improving the situation of such plaintiffs. To that end the Commission published a Green Paper at the end of December highlighting the scale of the problems and a number of options to tackle them. It is this Green Paper which will be the subject of the discussion at the Forum on the evening of April 5th.
The Forum is very lucky to have Mr Donnacadh Woods, the Senior DG Competition official who led the team that drafted the Green Paper, as one of the principal speakers at the April meeting.
Add comment March 3rd, 2006