


Eric Barbier de la Serre
Eric Barbier de La Serre has 20 years of experience in European and French competition law. He has handled numerous antitrust and state aid cases involving the telecommunications, electronic components, media, financial services, and energy sectors. Eric has been involved in settlement, commitment, interim relief, and sanctions proceedings before the European Commission and the French Competition Authority. He also has very extensive litigation experience before the EU courts and regularly advises on other aspects of EU law such as free movement of goods and services.
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4979 | Conferences


Articles
10233 Bulletin
223
In Short The Background: The European Commission ("Commission") recently unveiled long-awaited draft revisions to its Vertical Block Exemption Regulation ("VBER") and Vertical Guidelines. The VBER includes safe harbors that exempt some agreements in the vertical supply chain from antitrust (...)
383
In Short The Situation: According to the European Commission ("EC"), an increasing number of competitively significant transactions have evaded merger notification because one or both of the transacting parties (but typically a small, high value target) did not meet EC or any Member State (...)
461
In Short The Situation: The European Commission has launched its largest ever stimulus package to support recovery of EU economies from the COVID-19 pandemic’s unprecedented economic and social disruption. Each EU Member State must submit a recovery plan and funding requests for Commission (...)
120
In Short The Development: The European Commission ("EC") recently released two long-awaited legislative proposals, the Digital Services Act ("DSA") and Digital Markets Act ("DMA"), that would significantly increase the EC’s regulatory oversight of online platform companies (previewed in our (...)
405
In Short The Development: The European Court of Justice ("ECJ") ruled that the European Commission ("Commission") violated UPS’s rights of defense when it failed to provide UPS with the final economic model used in its decision to block UPS’s proposed acquisition of TNT in 2013. The Result: The (...)
361
In December 2018, the French Competition Authority ("FCA") published a notice clarifying the FCA’s settlement procedure in competition cases ("Notice"). The FCA’s General Rapporteur may offer settlement to companies that agree not to challenge the allegations made against them in the statement of (...)
239
In April 2017, the European Commission ("Commission") published a tender offer seeking an assessment of the EU market for loan syndication and possible implications under EU competition rules. The successful candidate will draft a report providing an overview of the market and the relevant (...)
345
This week, the French Competition Authority ("FCA") imposed a EUR 80 million fine on the Altice Group, a major French telecommunications operator, for implementing two transactions before approval by the FCA (so-called "gun jumping"). The full text is not yet available, but this decision (...)
940
Ask a lawyer to name the most basic procedural right, he/she will likely reply: “the rights of defence”. To many lawyers, these rights appear – maybe even before access to justice – as the most immediate and natural guarantee in criminal or quasi-criminal proceedings. After all, before Adam and (...)
818
The European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) recently ruled that dawn raids carried out at the premises of two French construction companies by the DGCCRF (French Department for Competition, Consumer Protection and Fraud) violated both the rights of defense and the right to privacy, due to (...)
186
The French Constitutional Council has declared constitutional the French Competition Authority’s power to (i) withdraw its decision authorizing a merger, for failure by the parties to comply with their commitments and (ii) has required that the parties re-notify their transaction. This is an (...)
954
A lesson on judicial review from the other European Court in Luxembourg* Legal change sometimes takes unpredictable paths: mid-April, something important happened for European law in Luxembourg, but this did not come from the European Court of Justice (the “ECJ”). Not every reader of this blog (...)
746
Unlimited jurisdiction: the end of a misnomer?* The past decade has seen a flurry of articles published trying to make sense of the degree of control that the EU Courts exercise on complex economic reasoning. By contrast, much less has been written about the Courts’ unlimited jurisdiction on (...)
1511
The literature on the modernisation of EU competition law has paid little attention to interim measures ordered by the European Commission and national competition authorities (NCAs). Yet their asymmetric development under the modernised system has proven to be a fascinating area for the (...)
602
Undertakings with a (seemingly) divided self: Beware* It is commonly accepted that, pursuant to the principle of intragroup immunity, Article 101 TFEU cannot catch agreements or concerted practices between entities that belong to the same undertaking. Article 101 TFEU requires coordination (...)
580
Google offers commitments to get off the radar screen* A case involving Google confirms that the French Competition Authority is keen on using a combination of interim measures and commitment proceedings in order help it quickly resolve maters which it perceives as competition issues. This may (...)
465
Dawn raids vs. the freedom of the press* Relying on what seems to be unprecedented reasoning, the President of the Paris Court of Appeals has quashed a judicial order authorizing a dawn raid against several companies belonging to Amaury, a French news group that publishes mainly sports (...)
463
The harmless error rule and the French commitment procedure* Merely one month before the ECJ delivered its very expected judgment in the Alrosa case, a ruling of the Paris Court of Appeals confirmed that the exercise of the rights of the defense in commitment procedures raises delicate issues (...)
431
Towards greater convergence on the calculation of fines* It is not uncommon for the law to progress as a consequence of significant discrepancies and disagreements arising between courts and enforcers. This is exactly what may currently be happening to the French rules governing the (...)
8308 Review
564
Independence and transparency go hand by hand and are of the utmost importance for competition authorities. Transparency is a safeguard for independence. Competition authorities must be independent by definition regarding both the public and the private sector. Total independence should be (...)
2429
Firms often choose to sell several products as a bundle, associated with a rebate. In other cases, they offer rebates to those clients who commit to buy their products for a long period of time, or for a high volume. In many cases, these various rebates only pass on to consumers the economies (...)
1085
This second roundtable of the conference “New frontiers of Antitrust”, Paris, 10 February 2012, was dedicated to procedural autonomy with regards to competition law enforcement. After a short introduction by Guy Canivet, member of the French Constitutional Council, Éric Barbier de la Serre, (...)
1803
The Ryanair/Aer Lingus case has recently revived a debate regarding the need for an ex ante review by competition authorities of the acquisition of minority shareholdings. Indeed, the concept of "control", which is used by a majority of the competition authorities, is in essence an ill-suited (...)
1084
This article attempts to define the main features of orders handed down in the field of competition law by the judges of the European Union, using the period between 1999 and 2011 as a basis for its analysis. It shows that the scope of competition law orders is in practice limited. It also (...)
1343
Les mesures conservatoires constituent un outil essentiel à l’application du droit de la concurrence. Cet outil ne s’est toutefois développé que récemment en Europe, les autorités de concurrences n’adoptant encore que rarement des mesures conservatoires. Mais les temps changent, puisque les autorités (...)
Books

This 3rd edition of the Competition Law Digest provides a synthesis of EU and national leading antitrust cases from 1990 to 2016. The book is structured in two parts: Part I deals with (...)

The purpose of this book is to compare and contrast EU competition case law with European Members States competition case law, and Members States competition case law with each other. To the best (...)