The Italian Supreme Court holds that legal effects on downstream contracts of an anti-competitive scheme are governed by national law and such contracts cannot be deemed automatically void in their entirety by invoking EU law (Albatel / Intesa Sanpaolo / Bosco)

On December 30, 2021, the Joint Section of the Italian Court of Cassation (which is the last-instance court for civil matters) issued a landmark judgment [1] clarifying the criteria to determine the civil law consequences of “downstream” contracts with respect to an upstream framework arrangement that was found to infringe the national equivalent of Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), which prohibit anti-competitive agreements. The court held that legal effects on downstream contracts of an anti-competitive scheme are governed by national law and therefore such contracts cannot be deemed automatically void in their entirety by invoking EU law. Under Italian law, only the individual clauses of downstream contracts that reproduce the same content that