Brussels, 16/06/2011 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday 16 June, the EU General Court delivered three judgments on Commission decisions with regard to companies involved in cartels.
It annulled the Commission decision of 3 May 2006 on the hydrogen peroxide and sodium perborate cartel in so far as it concerned L'Air liquide and Edison, which was fined €58.13 million), ruling that the Commission failed to adopt a detailed position on the evidence which those companies adduced in order to rebut the presumption that they exercised a decisive influence over the conduct of their subsidiaries. The fine of €167.06 million imposed on Solvay for its involvement in the same cartel was reduced to €139.50 million. The Court decided that the Commission erred in its assessment of the facts with respect to the period during which the company participated in the infringement, failing to prove participation between February 1994 and May 1995. It also acknowledged the quality of the information provided by Solvay during the investigation and increased the reduction in the fine from 10% to 20%.
The Court reduced the fines imposed on Heineken NV, its subsidiary Heineken Nederland BV from €219.28 million to €198 million, and on Bavaria NV from €22.85 million to €20.71 million for their participation in a cartel on the Dutch beer market from 27 February 1996 to 3 November 1999. It ruled that, in its decision of 18 April 2007 (see EUROPE 9409), the Commission failed to prove “that the infringement concerned the occasional coordination of commercial conditions, other than prices, offered to individual customers in the on-trade segment”. In addition, it ruled that the length of the administrative procedure had infringed the principle of a “reasonable period”, only partly compensated for by the flat-rate reduction of the fine granted by the Commission. For that reason, it took the view that the reduction should be increased to 5% of the amount of the fine.
It essentially upheld the Commission's decision of 11 March 2008 imposing fines totalling €32.76 million on 10 companies for their involvement, between October 1984 and September 2003, in a cartel on the international removals market in Belgium (see EUROPE 9621). The Court did, however, reduce the fine imposed on Gosselin from €3.28 million to €2.32 million, ruling that the Commission had only conclusively shown that the company participated in the infringement for 7 years and 6 months, and not for 10 years and 7 months. It also annulled the €104,000 fine imposed on Verhuizingen Coppens, finding that this company participated only in the agreement on cover quotes and that the Commission had not shown that the undertaking was aware of the subsequent anti-competitive conduct of the other companies (price setting, market sharing, etc). Therefore, the Commission was not entitled to find that the company had participated in a single and continuous infringement covering all the anti-competitive conduct. (F.G.)