European Commission Report on Competition Interim Measures Shows Prominent Role for Belgian Competition Authority
- 12/09/2024
- News
The European Commission (the Commission) published on 5 September 2024 a report on interim measures used by national competition authorities (NCAs) (see, attachment – the IM Report). When Directive 2019/1 to make NCAs more effective competition law enforcers (the ECN+ Directive) became law, the Commission promised to come up with an analysis of means to simplify the adoption of interim measures by NCAs. The resulting IM Report discusses the impact of the ECN+ Directive on the power of NCAs to impose national interim measures; the differences between the regulatory frameworks of the Member States in that regard; and the actual use of interim measures by NCAs.
In Belgium, the predecessor of the Belgian Competition Authority (BCA) was in 1991 one of the first competition authorities in Europe to be given the express power to adopt interim measures. The BCA now has the ability to impose such measures on its own initiative or at the request of a private party. For example, in April 2023, the BCA’s chief prosecutor sought of his own motion interim “hold separate” measures in a case in which the BCA had challenged an acquisition under the abuse of dominance rules (see, Van Bael & Bellis Life Sciences News and Insights of 21 April 2023, “Belgian Competition Authority Seeks Interim Measures Against Acquisition Not Caught by Merger Control Rules”). The IM Report discusses this case in some detail (at p. 14).
The IM Report shows that Belgium forms part of a small group of Member States in which the substantive legal test for imposing interim measures is less stringent than that applying to the Commission itself and that provided for by the ECN+ Directive, while the procedural requirements for adopting interim measures are less demanding than those governing proceedings on the merits. Additionally, and perhaps as the IM Report suggests not coincidentally, Belgium ranks second (only outperformed by France) for the number of interim measures adopted in the European Competition Network in the 20-year period between 1 May 2004 and 1 June 2024
