Brussels, 04/12/2000 (Agence Europe) - The Industry Council will, in the Tuesday session (see following pages), have a first exchange of views over the European Commission proposal aiming to radically modify EU competition policy towards agreements between enterprises and abuses of dominant positions (while the present regulation in terms of merger will not be affected). The most significant modification concerns the removal of the prior notification system for agreements. Thus, the Commission will not longer have to rule on a large number of cases of minor importance and could concentrate its attention on cartels that sometime serious block competition as well as (thanks to the enhancement of its investigation powers) for the detection of serious abuses (that either way are not notified). The enforcement of Articles 81 (former Article 85: ban on agreements) and 82 (former Article 86: ban on abuse of dominant position) will mainly be codified by the competition authorities and the jurisdictions of Member States, which apply directly to Community law. In order for this decentralisation not to lead to differences in assessment and judgments between the Member States, a cooperation and information exchange network between national authorities and between the authorities and the Commission will be put in place, in order to ensure coherence in the application of the rules and to safeguard to principal according to which economic operators must be treated in the same way throughout the EU. Moreover, the Commission will maintain the power of autonomous decision.
This "Monti reform" (named after the Commissioner responsible for competition, Prof. Mario Monti: see out section "A look behind the news" (in EUROPE of 2/3 October, pages 3-4) obviously raises a large number of problems. The national competition authorities have discussed it with the Commission in their last quarterly meeting and that raised a large number of issues over their role after the reform, over the ways to respect the coherence of decisions (how to guarantee that the severity against agreement is uniform?), etc. This Tuesday, The Ministers will be called to answer three fundamental questions: a) do the Member States accept a system removing the notification of agreements? b) how should the Commission/national competition authorities network function in respect of institutional balances? c) are the Member States satisfied with the balance proposed between the protection of competition on the one hand, and the legal obligation for enterprises, on the other? (the removal of the obligatory notification would imply that enterprises must themselves assess a priori the licit nature of the agreements to which they participate).