ON-TOPIC: COMPETITION POLICY – EUROPEAN UNION – INDIVIDUALS – CRIMINALISATION – SANCTIONS – LENIENCY

Individual sanctions for competition law infringements: Pros, cons and challenges

KEYWORDS

Following the substantive harmonisation in Regulation (EC) no. 1/2003, the Commission has started more recently to focus on procedure and sanctions, and in January 2016, the European Parliament called for penalties against natural persons. This ‘On Topic’ issue looks at the current state of individual sanctions on the Member State level, examines the institutional challenges these individual sanctions present, especially for leniency programmes, and discusses the pros and cons of introducing further individual, in particular criminal sanctions. This ‘On Topic’ issue examines the experience with criminal sanctions in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, and presents empirical evidence on public attitudes towards competition law infringements in various Member States and the United States.

Introduction Florian Wagner-von Papp [1] Reader in Law (Associate Professor), University College London (UCL), Faculty of Laws, London 1. Article 3 of Regulation (EU) 1/2003 aims at convergence of the substantive competition laws in the Member States of the European Union. To be sure, substantial differences between Member States’ laws remain in the areas of unilateral conduct and merger control [2]. Yet in the area of anticompetitive agreements, convergence has made great strides. National procedure and sanctions, however, were largely excluded from the convergence goal of Regulation (EU) 1/2003 [3], and on the matter of individual sanctions the recitals merely state that “as regards natural persons, they may be subject to substantially different types of sanctions across the various

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