Oleg Temnikov[1]
The author presents in this article the Judgment of the CJEU of of 14 September 2017 in the case Autortiesību un komunicēšanās konsultāciju aģentūra/Latvijas Autoru apvienība, C 177/16. He makes an overview of the conclusions adopted by the Court in its judgement and elaborates on the possible consequence for the application in the future by competition watchdogs of tests concerning the excessiveness of prices of dominant enterprises.
This case is one of the rare occasion on which the CJEU ruled on excessive pricing in competition law. The Court largely follows its case-law and the Opinion of AG Whatelet and reaffirms the two-staged test to be applied in such cases – a first analysis to determin whether a price is excessive, and a second stage to ascertain whether this excess is due to an abuse of dominance or to other reasons and could be thus justifiable. Further, AG Whatelet confirmed as well the different elements of the analysis at each of the two stages to be performed by the Commission or NCAs.
AG Whatelet suggested a very high and unusual standard of proof for excessive pricing case – namely – “magnitude that almost no doubt remains”, which however has not been followed by the Court to this extent and left this issue open.
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[1] Oleg Temnikov, Senior associate, Wolf Theiss Law Firm, Sofia, Bulgaria, email: oleg.temnikov@wolftheiss.com
The opinions and positions expressed by the author in this article are his personal scientific views on the topic. they may not be attributed to Wolf Theiss Law Firm or its lawyers, and are not necessarily identical with their position on the matter.