To bring a collective competition action in the Competition Appeal Tribunal (“CAT”), a proposed class representative first has to have their claim certified by the CAT. The CAT’s approach to certification is therefore an important issue and has been heavily scrutinised.  In this Insight, we look at three recent judgments of the Competition Appeal Tribunal where the CAT has stalled the progression of the claims: Gormsen v Meta Platforms, Inc., Justin Gutmann v Apple Inc., and Commercial and Interregional Card Claims.  We consider the factors that led to these decisions, which buck the trend over the last two years of class representatives achieving certification of their claims with relative ease, and set out our thoughts on the key learnings from the judgments.

The Competition Appeal Tribunal has handed down a judgment determining several preliminary issues in the £17 billion collective action brought against Mastercard in relation to anti-competitive multilateral interchange fees, following on from the European Commission’s infringement Decision.  In this Insight, we discuss the Tribunal’s rejection of Mastercard’s argument that it could rely on a counterfactual scenario premised on the interchange fees having been set at a lower, lawful level, thereby limiting the claimants’ recoverable losses. We consider in particular the Tribunal’s ruling that this argument was precluded by the binding effect of the decision, or alternatively, by the argument constituting an abuse of process given that Mastercard did not advance it before the Commission.

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Welcome to the Litigation Gazette. Each quarter, BCLP's Paris team will keep you informed of the main litigation news in competition law, commercial litigation, labor law, IP/IT/Data and compliance.

Competition Commission v W. Hing Construction & others [2022] HKCA 786 (judgment date: 2 June 2022) concerned an appeal from the first Hong Kong judgments concerning pecuniary penalties for contraventions of competition rules. The Court of Appeal held that pecuniary penalties for contraventions of competition rules are to be assessed based on the economic activities and conduct of the undertakings who are answerable for the contraventions, and that the legal or natural persons (entities) constituting such undertakings jointly and severally are liable for the pecuniary penalties. Accordingly, the Court of Appeal allowed the appeals by the Competition Commission (Commission) against two judgments in which the Competition Tribunal (Tribunal) reduced the pecuniary penalties ordered against the respondents in recognition of the respondents’ limited participation in the anti-competitive conduct because they had passed down various obligations through subcontracting and partnership arrangements in return for a portion of the value of sales related to the contravention.

As part of its response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, HM Government intends to fast-track the long-awaited Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill. The Bill requires overseas entities to register with, and provide details of their beneficial owners to, UK Companies House before the overseas entity can be registered as the legal owner of UK land. Based on the draft Registration of Overseas Entities Bill (published and consulted on in July 2018 and originally intended to go live in 2021) implementation is now expected to proceed at pace once the Bill becomes law.