The Netherlands is an established jurisdiction for bringing European follow-on damages procedures. Examples include the Sodium Chlorate, Paraffin Wax and Truck cartel cases. Cartel-damages cases are perfect examples of international disputes in which either the claimant or defendant, or both parties, are foreign companies coming from several European Member States. To illustrate by an example, the Sodium Chlorate case started […]
Clarifying the reasonableness test in the proposed guidelines of the European Commission on the passing-on of cartel overcharges
Virtually each dispute over claims for damages resulting from an infringement of competition law includes the question of how to deal with the fact that a direct purchaser from an infringer might have passed on all or part of the illegal overcharge to its own customers and thus, directly or indirectly, even down to the […]
TenneT vs ABB: The case and discussion about the passing-on defence continues
The discussion on the admissibility of the passing-on defence in the dispute between TenneT and ABB continued with the judgment of the Court of Appeal Arnhem-Leeuwarden (Gelderland) of 29 May 2018 (ECLI:NL:GHARL:2018:4876). The procedure concerns a follow-on damages action of the Dutch state-owned grid operator TenneT against ABB – and in a different procedure against […]
German Federal Court of Justice hands down landmark judgment in Cement Cartel Case
In 2005, Germany implemented legislation determining the suspension of limitation periods for damage claims during the investigation of a competition authority. However, since the adoption of the new provision it has been unclear whether the law applies on damage claims which arose before the entry into force of the new suspension provision (1 July 2005), […]
First Spanish Judgments in trucks cartel follow-on actions
The trucks cartel sanctioned by the European Commission in July 2016 has provoked a flood of individual claims all over Spain. They were filed by all types of transport and logistics companies against the six sanctioned manufacturers, their Spanish subsidiaries and even their financial services providers. Apart from several decisions on jurisdiction and access to […]