Access and Cartel Cases : Ensuring Effective Competition Law Enforcement

This book examines the legislative patchwork surrounding access to the European Commission's cartel case files.

Recent legislative changes have increased the value of the files and have also highlighted the inherent tension between a number of competing interests affecting their accessibility. The Commission is undoubtedly caught between a rock and a hard place, charged with the task to ensure due process, transparency and effectiveness while at the same time promoting both public and private enforcement of the EU competition rules. The author considers how best to ensure a proper balance between the legitimate, but often diverging interests of parties, third parties and national competition authorities in these cases.

The book provides a unique and comprehensive presentation of the EU legislation and case law surrounding access to the Commission's cartel case files. The author examines the question of accessibility from three different perspectives: that of the parties under investigation, cartel victims, and national competition authorities. The author also considers the EU leniency system and whether any legislative changes could make the attractiveness of the system less dependent on the possibilities of cartel victims to access the evidence contained in the Commission's case files.

Helene Andersson is Counsel at Delphi, Sweden. With 25 years in the field, her experience and expertise span the whole range of competition law matters. She has assisted clients in setting up and managing compliance programmes, headed the work related to dawn raid inspections and cartel investigations, defended clients in cartel cases before the Swedish courts, assisted clients with merger filings before both the Swedish Competition Authority and the European Commission, etc.

Helene has a background in academia where she has worked as a researcher and lecturer. In her research, she has mainly focused on due process aspects of EU competition law enforcement. She teaches both EU and competition law at the universities of Stockholm and Uppsala, Sweden. She is also regularly invited to speak at national and international competition law conferences. Photo credit to Niklas Björling.