Luxembourg, 19/09/2005 (Agence Europe) - The European Court of First Instance is likely to set the date for hearing of the parties in the trial between the European Commission and Microsoft for mid-2006. The new judge rapporteur, John Cook of Ireland, who took over the dossier part of the way through, started work after his appointment this summer. He takes up the dossier, which had been removed from Judge Hubert Legal after positions he took in a French publication were felt to be biased. the Irish judge has a good reputation and is considered to be an expert in European competition law.
According to observers, the President of the European Court, Bo Vesterdorf, could not leave the dossier in the hands of Judge Legal, whose writing could have been interpreted as biased in favour of the Commission. He had included a passage to the effect that there is nothing more disappointing than seeing an assessment written by staff from the Commission, who are highly familiar with a competition dossier, being substituted for another, "not necessarily better" assessment by Court staff who, exceptions notwithstanding, know it less well, in his reflections on the scope of the competencies of the European Court of First Instance in competition law (a subject which divides legal professionals: Ed.
In March 2004, Microsoft was fined nearly 500 million EUR and two obligations were placed upon it, which were: -to make information on the interoperability of its system with other applications or programmes available to its competitors; -to sell a Windows system without the multimedia reader Windows Media Player (for the negotiations between Microsoft and the Commission, see EUROPE 8917).