Lawful Business Coordination in Competition Law (CELDEFCOM)

The Project aims at undertaking an updated revision of the scope for a lawful business coordination in the context of European Competition Law, detecting the eventual regulatory inefficiencies that may cause false positives (over-application of competition law rules that prevent fruitful commercial relationships and therefore reduce PIB and creation of new jobs in the EU), and proposing new trends of solutions that serve as a basis for a doctrinal, judicial and legislative-policy debate.
Our team has an important research experience, both in competition law and in business coordination (business networks, distribution contracts, syndicate loans, patent pools, technology transfer agreements, joint-ventures, temporary business associations, and economic interest groupings). We have an extensive joint and individual list of publications in business coordination and competition Law and an important international experience both in competition law issues not related to business coordination, and in aspects of business coordination not related to competition law.

The project has ambitious objectives whose attainment has been planned along 3 years. Among them, the following can be highlighted: to analyse in depth European hard law and soft law, as well as the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the doctrine of the European Commission; to identify the main regulatory and applicative obstacles for an efficient business coordination, the new risks of collusion deriving from business coordination, and the more important discrepancies between the Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Commission in this matter; to organise problems systematically, in order to create groups that can be jointly analysed and to find solutions, in order to propose regulatory and applicative improvements.