EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS

EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS 2022

Prague, Czechia

personal links. Imposed obligations may be also purely on a commercial level, such as termination of various commercial agreements. The shared goal of all types of imposed obligations is obvious to ensure, that the result of merger is not going to distort competition in any way, either by allowing a very strong competitor to arise, consequently distorting the situation on the market or by creating less favourable conditions for end consumers. 6. Consequences of the actions performed against the merger ban Various authors do not agree on the fact, if actions made against the merger ban issued by the respective authority can or cannot have further consequences in private law, i.e., if such actions create invalidity or not. Here the question is that if the underlying contract establishing merger is invalid or ineffective from the beginning, there could have been no valid transfer of the shares/assets in question, i.e., no need to cancel such agreement (Bejček, 1996, p. 263). The second group of authors believe, that the private law consequences can also be seen in the subsequent conduct after the merger (making not just the actions creating the merger but also subsequent actions invalid) (Raus, Oršulová, 2014, p. 402). 7. Court review of the merger decision As the Czech merger control decision issued by the respective authority is considered a standard decision as issued per the Czech Act No. 500/2004 Sb., Administrative Act, it is therefore always possible to review this decision by a court. A competent court for this type of review is the District Court in Brno and this can be filed within two months from the delivery of the written decision of the competition authority. A potential subsequent step is filing a cassation complaint to the Supreme Administrative Court in Brno, within two weeks from the previous decision. The downside of the court review is, that despite the District Court in Brno having specific allocated judges for these type of cases (i.e., people having the necessary expertise), they usually cannot sufficiently question the original results in full, i.e., they do rely quite heavily on the conclusion of the competition authority and facts presented by the merging undertakings. 8. Conclusion The author believes, that from the text above it is clear, that the assessment of the consequences of a merger shall be mostly considered an economic issue, rather than a legal one. Legal terms used for a description of respective situations, such as “ substantial breach of effective competition ” are unfortunately rather vague and imprecise, i.e., can be used for a guidance but the whole decision should be

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