Olivier Fréget is the founding partner of Fréget & Associés. Previously he was a partner at Allen & Overy Paris heading the Paris EU & Competition team. He has specialised in EU and competition law since the very beginning of his career in 1990; his experience covers abuse of dominant position (in particular pricing practices such as predation, tying, bundling, squeezes, raising rivals’ costs, etc.), anti-competitive agreements, state aids, French Law restrictive practices and merger control. He has led several high profile private enforcement cases before the Commercial Courts. He has also represented clients before the General Court in particular in the context of state aid cases and merger decisions. Olivier has renowned expertise in the sector of the network industries (telecommunications, energy), the media (TV and radio) and pharmaceutical sectors. He is regularly quoted as leading individual in major rankings such as Chambers Global and Legal 500.
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On 2 April 2008, the Paris Court of Appeal has found France Télécom and the SFR-Cegetel Group infringed Articles 82 EC and L. 420-2 of the French Code de commerce, as a result of the implementation of practices of margin squeeze, between April 1999 and the end of 2001, in the market for «Fixed to (...)
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By a decision of 11 December 2007, the Competition Council issued yet another decision concerning the (difficult) competition between princeps and generics at the time when the latter enter a market which becomes accessible upon expiry of the former’s intellectual property rights. Although this (...)
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On 28 June 2007, the Competition Council ordered interim measures against Electricité de France ("EDF"), imposing it to market base-load electricity to alternative suppliers at a price enabling them to effectively compete with the incumbent operator’s retail sales on the free market (i.e.: (...)
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1. The Regulatory Context: positive discrimination as a starting point and the TFR a possible end to it Sales of reimbursable medicines to consumers are heavily regulated in France, from the level of the pharmaceutical company manufacturing them all the way through to the ultimate individual (...)
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This article refers to the recent amendments to the German Telecommunications Act introduced by a Law of 18 February 2007 on the modification of the telecommunications provisions (hereinafter: the “Law”) and aims at presenting the problems posed by the amendments from the point of view of EU (...)
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French Administrative Supreme Court (Conseil d’État), 31 January 2007, Société France Antilles, n° 294896 Introduction On 31 January 2007 the French Supreme Administrative Court (Conseil d’État) handed down a judgement annulling a merger authorisation in the press sector. This decision is worthy of (...)
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French Constitutional Court (Conseil Constitutionnel), 30 November 2006, Decision n° 2006-543 DC, Law regarding energy sector (“Loi relative au secteur de l’énergie”) http://www.conseil-constitutionnel.fr/decision/2006/2006543/index.htm Law n° 2006-1537 of 7 December 2006, regarding energy sector, (...)
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Minister of Economy, Finances and Industry, 6 October 2006, Letter to the Counsels of Le Monde editing society regarding a concentration in the edition sector (C2006-82) (“Lettre du Ministre de l’économie, des finances et de l’industrie du 6 octobre 2006, aux conseils de la société éditrice du (...)
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On 30th August 2006, the French Minister for the Economy, Finance and Industry (the Minister) authorised the merger between TPS and Canal Sat, the two satellite broadcasting and television service providers in France, after the parties entered into 59 commitments limiting the operation’s effect (...)
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On the 29th of August 2006, two years after Law n° 2004-669 of 9 July 2004 regarding electronic communication and audiovisual communication services came into force, the French government adopted an anticipated decree in pursuit of article 35 of the aforementioned law, relating to the dispute (...)
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The decision of European Commission (the Commission ) is legally founded in article 7(3) of the 2002 Framework Directive on electronic communications networks and services (the “Framework Directive” ) which empowers the Commission, through its Society and Media, and Competition (...)
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The Purpose of the Study In May 2006, the UK government’s Department of Trade and Industry (the DTI) and HM Treasury produced a Report (the “Report”) on the concurrent competition powers possessed by the UK’s sectoral regulators [Office of Gas and Electricitys Markets (Ofgem), Office of (...)
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Interview conducted by Olivier Fréget Partner, Fréget & Associés, Paris. For contract services, examples from other European countries have shown that opening up to competition has not necessarily led to lower tariffs. What benefits does the Authority expect from this, for users and the (...)
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Interview conducted by Charlotte Tasso-de Panafieu and Olivier Fréget, lawyers, Fréget - Tasso de Panafieu, Paris. For several years now, in addition to or in addition to your role as regulator, you have been alerting public opinion with some strong statements on the dangers of the "platform (...)
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With the rise of the common market and the search for a competition law based on “sound economic principles” during the end of the twentieth century, we buried the now aged German ordo-liberal philosophy. This finality had as a purpose to maintain certain types of markets as a finality in itself. (...)
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Innovation today is shifting the established positions of a growing number of companies and industries. There is no shortage of qualifiers to underline the power of this phenomenon: drastic innovation, destabilising innovation, disruptive innovation, radical innovation, disruptive innovation. (...)
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The optic fiber is being deployed by using a large part of the civil engineering infrastructures (the ducts) built between 1965 and 1995. These infrastructures have been financed by the Administration des Postes and later by France Télécom within the framework of their successive monopolies, (...)
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This paper is derived from a seminar held by Concurrences review in Paris on 11 January 2011 together with the author and Mrs Valérie Meunier, member of the Chief Economist team of the Competition Authority, and M. David Spector, economist, MAPP. The author calls for a limitation of the ambit (...)
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This set of three papers is derived from the training session on the predatory strategies organised by Concurrences Review that has held on 5th July 2010 in Paris. The first paper is a short introduction of the Economist Etienne Pfister presenting the preemptive strategies and how these (...)
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The French Gambling Act was initiated under a certain pressure from the European Commission, under the impulse of the Court of Justice case law, given that the compliance with EU law of the previous blanket prohibition in France of gambling apart from State monopolies, partly justified by the (...)
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Evaluating of the effects, on competition on the market, of mergers between companies that provide differentiated products is complex; it is not so much the definition of the market or the position of the parties that matter, but the ability of the new entity to raise prices profitably. The (...)
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The set of six articles covers a wide panel of points of views ten years after the 1999 EC Directive. Readers will be able to read the following contributions: 1. Update on Wholesale Energy Market Regulation - Philippe Redaelli, General Counsel and Chief Financial Officer, Powernext; 2. (...)
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The Novelli Report - Commission for Finances, Economics and Planing - relaunched the debate about a prospective merger between the two French competition authorities, i.e. the Competition Council and the DGCCRF, a unit of the Ministry of the Economics. The Editorial Board of the review (...)
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Both the efficiency and the legitimacy of sector-specific regulation rely on the guarantee that the relevant regulators have not been «captured» by those they are expected to regulate. The present article proceeds with a brief analysis, first, of the formal mechanisms that reduce the risks of (...)
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