The Court of Justice of the European Union has dismissed the actions brought by the banks Crédit Agricole and Crédit Suisse seeking annulment of the European Commission’s finding of April 2021 imposing fines of €3.9 million and €11.9 million respectively on them for participating in a cartel between 2010 and 2015 (from January 2013 for Crédit Agricole) on the secondary market for suprasovereign, sovereign and government agency bonds denominated in dollars (“SSA bonds”) (see EUROPE 12708/26), in a judgment handed down on Wednesday 6 November (cases T-386/21 and T-406/21).
In its judgment, the General Court finds that the conduct of traders employed by those banks was part of an overall plan pursuing a single anticompetitive objective, even if, after February 2013, discussions between traders were less frequent.
According to the General Court, the European Commission did not have to demonstrate the effects on competition of the conduct of the four banks that took part in the cartel (the two banks mentioned above plus Deutsche Bank and Bank of America). It therefore did not make any errors in assessing the economic context of the conduct at issue or in its assessment of whether it was sufficiently harmful to competition.
Finally, the General Court endorsed the methodology used to calculate the amount of the fine applied, which was based not on turnover, as is usually the case, but rather on a proxy for that turnover. This proxy was calculated on the basis of the notional amounts of the ‘SSA bonds’ that the penalised banks traded during their individual periods of participation in the infringement at issue, to which an adjustment factor was applied.
Read the General Court’s judgment: https://aeur.eu/f/e7i (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)