Resale price maintenance: The French Competition Authority condemns two importers of mobile heaters as well as some of their French distributors for a combined set of horizontal and vertical anticompetitive agreements (PVG, Ligne Plus, Leroy Merlin)

*This article is an automatic translation of the original article, provided here for your convenience. Read the original article. This decision is reminiscent of an old case which, like this one, combined elements of a horizontal cartel between two importers and a vertical cartel between them and their main distributors in France, namely the so-called "school calculators" case (CA Paris, 21 September 2004). This case also contains a number of ingredients that make it a good textbook case: old and well-established practices, explicit e-mails, candidly detailed handwritten notes, a delving into the relations between suppliers and distributors that concretely illustrates the pressure exerted by the former to have the latter apply "public" prices, and - often - the latter's acquiescence