The Luxembourg Administrative Court rules that notaries are not allowed to provide information on their clients to a Competition Authority

Facts On 22 July 2010, the Luxembourg Competition Inspectorate ("Inspection de la concurrence") requested two notaries public to provide information pursuant to Article 13(3) of the 2004 Competition Act ("Loi du 17 mai 2004 relative à la concurrence"). According to the latter, the Inspectorate can ask, by way of decision, "undertakings and associations of undertakings" to provide information within the framework of a competition investigation. Articles 18(1)(2) and 20(1)(3) of the same law provide respectively for fines and penalties in case of inaccurate or incomplete response to such a request. In the case at hand, the requests were made following a cooperation request by the Hungarian competition authority [1], which needed to identify the economic beneficiary(ies) of a given