EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS

Prague, Czechia

EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS 2022

of Sazka a. s. The inspection carried out by the Czech Office for the Protection of Competition was challenged by Fortuna as an unlawful interference precisely because the supervisory authority should have used only information from the complainant, i.e. in a specific case from Sazka. 6 The Regional Court in Brno first granted the unlawful interference, stating that: “The addition of SAZKA’s complaint in the present case is ‘shrouded in secrecy’, which results from the fact that, according to their content, the additions were clearly made following the conduct of SAZKA and the complainant, about whom no procedural trace is found in the administrative file. It is not entirely clear in what position SAZKA was in the relatively long period between the filing of the original complaint (June 2017) and the local investigation (March 2019), how the roles between SAZKA and the complainant were realistically divided at that time in obtaining possible evidence of anti-competitive activities of SAZKA’s competitors, on what basis this occurred, and is therefore not entirely excluded, that the complainant has become an instrument of SAZKA’s competitive struggle. This also weakens the probative value of the facts on which SAZKA’s gradual informing of the complainant is based by supplementing the original complaint without a clear activity of the complainant, which would consist in verifying the facts resulting from SAZKA’s submission. Of course, the fact that a relatively long period elapsed between the filing of the complaint (June 2017) and the local investigation (March 2019) cannot be evidence that the complainant himself investigated the SAZKA complaint. At the time of the local investigation, according to the Regional Court, the complainant had no real evidence of coordination between the applicant and the TIPSPORT group in the field of odds betting, and the local investigation carried out at the applicant’s business premises, which was defined quite broadly, showed signs of an effort to “find something” ” (Judgment of the Regional Court in Brno, 29 A 183/2019) . However, the Supreme Court also ruled on the case, rejecting the above-mentioned conclusions of the Regional Court in Brno: “The Supreme Administrative Court agrees with the complainant that the current complaint, including its subsequent amendments of 9. 1. 2017 and 6. 6. 2018, containing a description of the sports betting business, including data on total revenues on the relevant betting market in the Czech Republic and shares of the largest players, a description of the legal conditions for simplified identification of bettors when operating odds bets, a description of the mutual division of marketing activities between FORTUNA and TIPSPORT and their coordination, a description of the pressure on the submitter with regard to 2 As 295/2019 “undercutting” of prices in the odds market, a description of the coordination of odds offers and a description of the coordination of entities within the APKURS association with its the content and level of processing seems to be entirely plausible. the combination of the information resulting from these documents was sufficiently specific (and therefore verifiable in further

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