Frédéric Puel, avocat registered at the Hauts de Seine and Brussels Bars (Member of the board of the Brussels Bar), is specialized in EC and French competition law. He is a partner in the leading French law firm FIDAL since 1999 and leads the EU and French competition law team. In charge of the Brussels office, he is half-time in Paris. He advises companies regarding antitrust issues (assistance during competition inquiries, proceedings before the European Commission and Court of First Instance, DGCCRF and Conseil de la concurrence, competition audits and staff trainings), merger control or State aids. He also advises companies regarding distribution law. He has experiences in various sectors, in particular, in the temporary work industry, B2B market places, plastic industry, automotive, insurance and banking, pharmaceutical industry, wood industry ...). From 1993 to 1999, he was the head of the lobby of the French Bars in Brussels (Delegation des Barreaux de France) where he acquired a strong experience of the relationship with the EU Institutions. He is also a speaker in various seminars in competition law (European Competition Forum (Brussels), ESSEC, Development Institute International, Chamber of commerce, professionals associations ...) and has written articles in different newspapers (Les Echos, Option Finance, The European Lawyer, L’Echo).
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GCEU, 06.09.2013, Deutsche Bahn AG v. Commission, cases T-289/11, T-290/11 and T-521/11 Companies sought the annulment of inspection decisions of the European Commission and of all decisions taken on the basis of those decisions, as well as the return of all documents seized during those (...)
231
Cass. crim. 27 February 2013, Dalkia, appeal No. 11-82-446; Les Rapides du Val-de-Loire, appeal No. 11-88.471; Cars Dunois, appeal No. 11-88.470; Dalkia, appeal No. 11-82.447 Four rulings handed down by the Criminal Division of the Court of Cassation on 27 February 2013 confirm the legal (...)
96
The Court of Cassation censured the order of a first president of the Court of Appeal which had quashed the order of a JLD authorising operations of visits and seizures in a company on the grounds that the Administration, which justified its inspection by complaints from competitors denouncing (...)
128
The European Commission had brought an action before a Belgian commercial court to obtain compensation, on behalf of the EU, for damage suffered by the European institutions as a result of anti-competitive practices in the lift sector. The court had then questioned the CJEU on a possible (...)
168
CA Paris, August 31, 2012, Google v/ Director General of Public Finance, RG n° 11/13233 One company contested the home visits ordered by the JLD on the basis of Article 16B of the Book of Tax Proceedings on the grounds that "the documents seized [had] been taken from places outside the (...)
101
This section selects books on themes related to competition laws and economics. This compilation does not attempt to be exhaustive but rather a survey of themes important in the area. The survey usually covers publication over the last three months after publication of the latest issue of (...)
145
Cass. com, 15 May 2012, Razel and Sefi, Appeal No. 11-18.507 The Court of Cassation overturned a decision of the Paris Court of Appeal which had overturned a decision of the Competition Council pronounced more than ten years after the cessation of the practices on the grounds that "new (...)
151
ECHR, 05.04.2012, Bouygues télécom v. France, n° 2324/08 The European Court of Human Rights has rejected as "manifestly ill-founded" the application by a telephone operator to have the proceedings that led to its conviction in 2005 for participation in a cartel in the mobile telephone market (...)
174
CA Paris, 16.02.2012, Philips France, n° 2011/00951 In support of a referral to the Competition Authority, a company had submitted several audio recordings of conversations made without the knowledge of representatives of the various suppliers it suspected of a cartel. On two occasions, (...)
224
Cass. com, 17 January 2012, "Tariff margin squeeze in mobile telephony" case, Appeal No 11-13.067 CA Metz, order, 25 November 2011, Coved, RG n° 10/04248 Cass. com, 14 February 2012, Cemex Bétons, appeals no. 11-11.750 and 11-13.130, According to the Court of Cassation, "the obligation (...)
1967
Even though the autonomy requirement excludes competitors’ information exchanges of which the purpose or the effect would be to distort the market forces of supply and demand, certain exchanges can nonetheless be deemed to favor competition. Generally speaking, the consequences of exchanges (...)
3284
The preparation and implementation of a merger or acquisition necessarily entails that the parties to that planned transaction share information with a view to defining the terms and assessing the interest of their agreement. By sharing a certain type of information that is considered as (...)
4719
Le règlement communautaire REACH a été adopté le 18 décembre 2006, et est entré dans sa phase active depuis le 1er janvier 2009. Il impose aux entreprises de coopérer en vue d’enregistrer toutes substances chimiques qu’elles produisent, importent ou utilisent sur le territoire de l’UE, sous (...)
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The increasing number of antitrust dawn raids and seizures raises the question of the scope of the National Competition Authority’s and the European Commission’s rights regarding seized or copied documents. In principle, the search warrant issued by the judge constitutes the strict scope of (...)
10894
Cartels and leniency policy, Philip Lowe Abstract For already one decade, the fight against cartels has been constituting one of the priority policies of the Commission. The tools the European authority has at its disposal have been appreciably strengthened by the Regulation 1/2003 which (...)
