Today the German government revealed its refined proposal for an amendment to the German antitrust statute.
Key points include:

Giving consumer associations the right to file actions aimed at scooping off cartel profits
Extending the applicability of German antitrust law to pubic health insurance funds
Renewing the sector-specific pricing rules for (dominant) suppliers of electricity and gas
Refining the rules [...]

 
We interrupt today’s regularly scheduled Monopoly Monday blog posting to bring you recent merger developments.
 
Last week, the Bundeskartellamt published its “Draft Guidance on Substantive Merger Control” for public consultation.  The guidance document is a substantial overhaul of the previous document which was published in 2000 under the title “Principles of Interpretation of Market Dominance”. The [...]

 
In October, the Bundeskartellamt published a notice on binding quality standards for expert economic opinions. The aim of these standards is to ensure that expert economic opinions submitted to the authority as part of competition law proceedings satisfy minimum quality requirements. The notice is also intended to standardize the process of submission and evaluation of [...]

 
The Danish Competition Authority recently released a report that identifies and quantifies the competition culture in Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The results are based on empirical data from a qualitative survey among more that two thousands firms and several thousands consumers. The report concludes that Danish firms have a potential to increase their [...]

 
The Advocacy Working Group has an ongoing work stream on market studies. Last year, the AWG produced a comparative report on the practice of market studies in 37 member jurisdictions, available here.
For this year’s annual conference, the AWG produced a “Market Studies Good Practice Handbook” and developed a “Market Studies Information Store.” The forthcoming information [...]

Today’s Web Wednesday returns the favor and recognizes member agencies that highlight their involvement in the ICN. To varying degrees, member agencies describe their international work, their participation in the ICN and the work of the ICN more generally, post contributions or their ICN templates, or just provide a link to find the ICN. The [...]

 
On TUESDAY, APRIL 13, 2010 at 8:00-9:30 Washington DC time, 14:00-15:30 Brussels time, the ICN Merger Working Group will host a teleseminar and webinar, TOOLS FOR CHANGE. Participants will present brief case studies on the role the ICN and its resources have played in helping member agencies and their governments enact changes to their merger rules, [...]