Brussels, 31/01/2002 (Agence Europe) - In its report to the Council and to the European Parliament regarding transatlantic agreements on the application of competition rules, the European Commission noted "further intensification of cooperation between the Union and the United States" over the past year. In the case of Canada, the bilateral agreement is much more recent and the Commission stresses the "far closer" relationship that has developed since 1999 in this field, allowing each to "better understand the competition policy of the other party" and to realise how important it is to "avoid contradictory decisions".
The report also provides an occasion for the Commission to return to the MCI World/Com/Sprint affair, the "first concentration project involving an American company" that had not been cleared by Brussels. It also allows it to soberly recall that "it rapidly reached the conclusion that the project would have repercussions at world level", mainly on the high level Internet connectivity market. It is nonetheless at the level of crossborder mergers that cooperation has proved the "closest and most productive". It has made it possible to increase the convergence of approaches followed by the two authorities to enhance the possible anti-competitive effects of these operations, states the report. The Commission also notes greater convergence of views on the identification and the implementation of correcting measures as well as controls consecutive to the operation, intended to verify whether the measures agreed were fully implemented. Cooperation on other kinds of affairs, mainly with a view to combating agreements at world level, has "clearly improved", to such a point that the contacts between the European and American competition authorities have become "quite common place", the Commission is pleased to note. It also notes, however, that they remain "less frequent than for cases of merger", because current cooperation agreements do not allow them to exchange confidential information that they hold, except if the source of such information expressly renounces the right to this confidentiality.