Causal link: The Palermo Tribunal rejects a claim for damages following the conviction for an anti-competitive agreement in the absence of proof of the causal link between the anti-competitive practice and the alleged harm (Roche SPA c/ Terrasi)

*This article is an automatic translation of the original article, provided here for your convenience. Read the original article. By judgment of 17 May 2017, the Court of First Instance of Palermo ruled on an action for damages following the public action by which, in 2014, the Authority for the Protection of Competition and the Market (hereinafter 'AGCM') had sanctioned an unlawful agreement between two pharmaceutical laboratories which had agreed to promote sales of Lucentis, used for ophthalmological treatments, at the expense of Avastin, a drug normally used as an anti-cancer drug but which, in practice, is also used for age-related macular degeneration (hereinafter 'AMD'). The anti-competitive cartel took the form of a strategy of "artificial differentiation" of the two