The judgment of the Ghent Court of Appeal of 15 September 2025 adds an important new chapter to the European Trucks cartel litigation. The decision deserves attention not only because it appears to be the first Belgian appellate judgment awarding substantial damages in the follow-on Trucks cartel litigation, but also because of its procedural approach to cartel damages quantification.
Faced with proceedings that had already been ongoing for many years and a dispute that concerned events dating back to the late 1990s, the court consciously chose not to embark on a further round of complex expert evidence and disclosure exercises. Instead, it relied on its power to estimate damages ex aequo et bono and fixed the cartel overcharge at 7.5%.
The judgment is therefore as much about procedural autonomy, proportionality and effective judicial protection as it is about the quantification of harm caused by the pan-European Trucks Cartel.
From infringement decision to damages award
The case concerns a follow-on damages litigation arising from the European Commission’s Trucks cartel decision. As is well known, the Commission found that several truck manufacturers had engaged in long-running coordination relating to gross list prices and the timing and passing-on of costs associated with EURO emissions technologies.
The Ghent Court of Appeal emphasised that pricing constitutes one of the central parameters of competition and rejected the defendants’ argument that gross list prices had no meaningful relationship with actual transaction prices. Even if final prices were ultimately negotiated at dealer level, coordinated increases in gross list prices inevitably affected downstream pricing and bargaining dynamics.
The court therefore accepted that the infringement was capable of causing harm to purchasers of trucks and that the existence of damage could be inferred from the nature, duration and scope of the cartel.
The Harrington / Schinkel theory of harm
The judgment is also noteworthy for its extensive engagement with the theory of harm developed by professors Joseph Harrington et Maarten Pieter Schinkel.
Referring to the same analytical framework that played a prominent role in the Trucks Cartel litigation pursued by CDC Cartel Damage Claims (CDC) in the Netherlands (i.e. District Court of Amsterdam, 12 May 2021, C/13/639718 / HA ZA 17-1255 et seq; and District Court of Amsterdam, 15 April 2026, ECLI:NL:RBAMS:2026:3734), the court accepted that gross list prices served as the starting point of the pricing process and that coordinated inflation of those prices could influence transaction prices throughout the distribution chain.
The court expressly endorsed the reasoning that lower levels of the distribution chain were generally unaware of the cartel arrangements and therefore reacted to gross-list-price increases as if they reflected genuine market developments and cost increases.
In doing so, the Ghent Court joined a growing number of European courts willing to engage directly with sophisticated economic theories explaining how information exchanges and gross-list-price coordination result in economic harm for customers.
Procedural autonomy and the refusal to prolong the litigation
Based on the Harrington / Schinkel theory, the court accepted that the existence of harm was sufficiently established. The key question was how that harm should be quantified.
The claimant relied on combination of economic and judicial material to quantify its loss, including the Oxera studies on cartel overcharges, comparative case law from other European jurisdictions and, in particular, a Spanish judgment of the Toledo Court (Case 167/2018) that applied a 25.175% overcharge rate in a truck cartel damages action. The defendants, for their part, challenged both causation and quantum and argued that the evidence provided by the claimant was insufficient. In many jurisdictions, such a dispute would likely have resulted in the appointment of a court expert and potentially years of additional litigation regarding the economic analysis and the inherent evidentiary difficulties to precisely quantify the harm.
The Ghent Court deliberately chose a different route.
The court stressed that the cartel lasted from 1997 until 2011 and that considerable time had already elapsed since both the infringement and the Commission’s 2016 decision. These circumstances made any precise reconstruction of the hypothetical competitive price exceptionally difficult.
The judgment discusses the limitations of traditional counterfactual methodologies, including before-and-after comparisons and benchmarking exercises. According to the court, the passage of time, changing economic conditions and the complexity of the truck market substantially reduced the prospects of achieving a truly precise quantification exercise.
Equally important was the court’s concern about procedural efficiency. The judgment explicitly recognises that competition-law expert investigations require sophisticated economic modelling, generate substantial costs and frequently result in lengthy proceedings.
Against that background, the court concluded that appointing a judicial expert was not appropriate. The prospect of obtaining a somewhat more precise damages calculation did not justify the additional delay, expense and procedural complexity that such an exercise would inevitably entail.
Disclosure, evidentiary asymmetry and judicial pragmatism
The same procedural logic can be seen in the court’s treatment of evidentiary issues.
The judgment acknowledges the manifest imbalance between claimants and cartel defendants, who typically control much of the relevant pricing and economic information. It also refers to the defendants’ duty to cooperate in evidentiary matters.
Yet, despite recognising these asymmetries, the court ultimately avoided procedural steps that would likely have prolonged the litigation further. Read as a whole, the judgment suggests that the court considered the marginal evidentiary benefits of additional disclosure and expert analysis insufficient when weighed against the need to bring already long-running proceedings to a conclusion.
Quantification ex aequo et bono: 7.5%
Having rejected the need for further expert investigation, the court turned to judicial estimation.
In line with Art. 17 (1) of the EU Damages Directive, Belgian law permits courts to estimate damages where precise quantification is impossible or disproportionately difficult. The Ghent Court considered this to be precisely such a case.
The judgment expressly states that an ex aequo et bono assessment constituted the only realistic and fair solution capable of ensuring that the victim would obtain compensation within a reasonable timeframe.
The claimant relied on a Spanish judgment of 27 February 2020 (Case 167/2018) from Toledo adopting an overcharge of 25.175%. The court declined to follow that figure. Instead, it surveyed a range of European case law. It noted that Spanish courts had frequently used forfaitaire or percentage-based methods, but that the Toledo figure stood at the upper end of the spectrum. Other Spanish decisions had adopted lower percentages, while German judgments had awarded figures between 10% and 15%[1].
The court further considered it unlikely that cartel effects had remained constant throughout the cartel’s fourteen-year duration. A sustained average overcharge exceeding 25% was regarded as implausible.
Taking all circumstances into account, the court confirmed the first-instance assessment and fixed damages at 7.5% of the relevant purchases.
A milestone for private enforcement beyond Trucks?
The Ghent judgment may prove influential far beyond the Trucks cartel litigation.
Its importance lies not only in the damages award itself, but also in the procedural message it sends. The judgment suggests that courts may rely on their powers of judicial estimation where the pursuit of alleged economic precision would lead to disproportionate delay and cost. This is in particular the case where the passage of time, changing economic conditions, the lack of data and information covering the entire infringement period make a precise estimation of the hypothetical “but for price” very difficult if not impossible.
Whether one agrees with the precise 7.5% figure or not, the judgment sends a clear signal. In cartel damages litigation, the pursuit of perfect quantification should not become an obstacle to obtaining compensation within a reasonable time.
By Amelia Mora and Till Schreiber
[1] J.F. LABORDE, Cartel damages actions in Europe: How courts have assessed cartel overcharges, Concurrences No. 3-221, (232) 242, pp. 52–54
