Category Archives: Damages

by Tristan Jones | December 11, 2020 · 11:48 am

Collective Actions in the Supreme Court

The big news from today’s UK Supreme Court collective action decision in Mastercard v Merricks [2020] UKSC 51 is not only that Mr Merricks won and defeated the appeal, but that the Supreme Court approached the issues in a far more claimant-friendly way than even the Court of Appeal had done.

The headlines are that, when a person applies for a collective proceedings order:

The statutory question for the Tribunal is not whether the claims are “suitable” to be brought as collective proceedings in some general sense; it is whether they are more suitable to be brought as collective proceedings than as individual claims. This marks a major shift, and it caused the dissenting judges to warn that the new approach will, “very significantly diminish the role and utility of the certification safeguard”.
The applicant does not need to meet any particular merits or evidential threshold, other than the ordinary tests applicable if the respondent applies for strike out or summary judgment.
If the applicant is seeking an aggregate award of damages, he/she does not need to show that it will be possible to distribute the damages to class members in a way which reflects or even approximates each individual’s actual loss.

Most readers will know the background. Mr Merricks wants to bring opt-out collective proceedings (i.e. a class action) against MasterCard in respect of the loss allegedly suffered by some 46.2 million UK consumers, which he estimates will come to several billion pounds. The Competition Appeal Tribunal refused to certify the claim. The Court of Appeal held that the CAT had erred in law. For more background see our earlier blogs here and here.

The Supreme Court agreed with the Court of Appeal. It is an unusual – perhaps unique – decision in that two judges (Lord Briggs and Lord Thomas) delivered judgment in favour of Mr Merricks, and two (Lord Sales and Lord Leggatt) delivered a strongly-expressed dissent. The reason why Mr Merricks won is that Lord Kerr was the fifth judge on the panel which heard the appeal, and he had expressed his agreement with Lords Briggs and Thomas before his untimely death on 1 December.

The decision will undoubtedly be a much-needed shot in the arm for the collective action regime, which has been a major disappointment since its introduction in 2015 (still not a single case has been certified). However, there will also be a lot of scope for debate in future cases. Having been in both the Merricks case (for the intervener, Which?) and also in the other collective action case, Pride (see here), this is my initial take on today’s judgment.

Statutory framework

It is helpful to recap a couple of elements of the statutory framework. Collective proceedings are governed by section 47B of the Competition Act 1998. A person who wants to act as a representative in collective proceedings needs to apply for certification. There are a few hurdles to overcome, but the one which the Merricks case is concerned with, and which is likely to be the main hurdle in most of these claims, is at s.47B(6):

“Claims are eligible for inclusion in collective proceedings only if the Tribunal considers that they raise the same, similar or related issues of fact or law and are suitable to be brought in collective proceedings.”

So, for present purposes, to be certified (i) the claims must raise common issues (i.e. “the same, similar or related issues of fact or law”), and (ii) the claims must be suitable to be brought in collective proceedings. The main focus of the Merricks judgment is on the suitability requirement, although it also touches on the common issues requirement.

In relation to the suitability requirement, the Tribunal Rules contain a list of potentially relevant considerations. Rule 79(2) states:

“In determining whether the claims are suitable to be brought in collective proceedings […] the Tribunal shall take into account all matters it thinks fit, including –
(a)        whether collective proceedings are an appropriate means for the fair and efficient resolution of the common issues;
(b)        the costs and the benefits of continuing the collective proceedings;
(c)        whether any separate proceedings making claims of the same or a similar nature have already been commenced by members of the class;
(d)       the size and the nature of the class;
(e)        whether it is possible to determine in respect of any person whether that person is or is not a member of the class;
(f)        whether the claims are suitable for an aggregate award of damages; and
(g)        the availability of alternative dispute resolution and any other means of resolving the dispute, including the availability of redress through voluntary schemes whether approved by the CMA under section 49C of the 1998 Act or otherwise.”

Item (f) in the above list refers to whether the claims would be suitable for an “aggregate award of damages”. That is a reference to another important feature of the statutory framework: under s.47C of the Act, if collective proceedings are successful then instead of requiring the defendant to pay each class member their individual loss, it could be required to make one overall payment to the representative reflecting the overall (or aggregate) loss of the class. That lump sum would then be distributed between class members by the class representative.

The essential reasoning in Merricks

The Tribunal rejected Mr Merricks’ application for certification for two broad reasons.

Distribution to class members

One of the Tribunal’s reasons was that, even if one could calculate the aggregate damage suffered by the proposed class as a whole, it would be impossible to calculate the loss suffered by each individual class member, even on an approximate basis. The problem with that, according to the Tribunal, was that the aggregate award could not be distributed among class members in accordance with ordinary compensatory principles. Mr Merricks’s own proposed method of distribution is very blunt: he intends to divide the overall sum between class members, distinguishing between them only on the basis of how many years they were in the class for. That essentially means that the older you are the more money you will get, regardless of your spending habits, so the proposed method of distribution cannot be described as compensatory.

The Supreme Court held that the Tribunal’s approach to this issue contained an error of law. As Lord Briggs said at [58], the ordinary compensatory principle is “expressly, and radically, modified” by the collective action regime. In particular:

“Where aggregate damages are to be awarded, section 47C of the Act removes the ordinary requirement for the separate assessment of each claimant’s loss in the plainest terms. Nothing in the provisions of the Act or the Rules in relation to the distribution of a collective award among the class puts it back again. The only requirement, implied because distribution is judicially supervised, is that it should be just, in the sense of being fair and reasonable.”

Lord Briggs acknowledged at [77] that, in some cases, even if there is an aggregate damages award then it might be appropriate to distribute the award in such a way as to make some approximation towards individual loss. But that will depend on what is fair and reasonable in the circumstances, and compensatory distribution is not a requirement of the scheme.

Evidence to prove loss

The other reason relied on by the Tribunal to refuse certification was that the claims were not suitable for an aggregate award of damages, and also not suitable to be brought in collective proceedings, because the Tribunal was not satisfied that there was sufficient data available for Mr Merricks’s economic experts, using the approach they had identified, to establish the overall damages on a sufficiently sound basis.

In reaching that conclusion, the Tribunal had applied a test which all of the parties agreed should be applied, drawn from Canadian class action jurisprudence. The key part of the Canadian approach was that:

“[…] the expert methodology must be sufficiently credible or plausible to establish some basis in fact for the commonality requirement. This means that the methodology must offer a realistic prospect of establishing loss on a class-wide basis so that, if the overcharge is eventually established at the trial of the common issues, there is a means by which to demonstrate that it is common to the class (ie that passing on has occurred). The methodology cannot be purely theoretical or hypothetical but must be grounded in the facts of the particular case in question. There must be some evidence of the availability of the data to which the methodology is to be applied.”

It worth pausing here to comment on the archaeology of this particular test. In the Pride case (the first certification claim before the Tribunal) the defendant sought to persuade the Tribunal to follow US case-law, which establishes a high threshold for class action certification. The Tribunal rejected that invitation, noting that the UK framework is closer to the Canadian regime, which has a much lower threshold. The Tribunal then endorsed the statement, set out above, from the Canadian caselaw. The Tribunal was, therefore, always intending to adopt a low threshold.

However, there was always something unsatisfactory about treating the Canadian approach as a sort of legal test in this country. For one thing, as Lord Briggs explains, it is used for slightly different purposes in the Canadian framework: if you read the test carefully you will notice that it is directed at whether loss is common to the class, which is not really what the “suitability” issue in the UK framework is about. And for another thing, the “test” for certification in this country is set out in the 1998 Act and in the Tribunal Rules, which do not refer to this particular legal threshold, or indeed to anything similar.

Nonetheless, the parties in Merricks agreed on the applicability of the Canadian test, and the argument was over whether it had been met. The Tribunal found that it had not. The Court of Appeal decided that the Tribunal had erred in that decision.

The Supreme Court discarded the Canadian test. Lord Briggs’s starting point is that collective proceedings are designed to provide access to justice where the ordinary forms of individual civil claim have proved inadequate, and that “it should not lightly be assumed that the collective process imposes restrictions upon claimants as a class which the law and rules of procedure for individual claims would not impose” [45]. Lord Briggs points out that, in an ordinary claim, provided that the pleadings can pass any strike-out or summary judgment application, the matter is permitted to go to trial. As the point is put at [47]:

“Where in ordinary civil proceedings a claimant establishes an entitlement to trial in that sense, the court does not then deprive the claimant of a trial merely because of forensic difficulties in quantifying damages, once there is a sufficient basis to demonstrate a triable issue whether some more than nominal loss has been suffered. Once that hurdle is passed, the claimant is entitled to have the court quantify their loss, almost ex debito justitiae.”

Lord Briggs then introduces a lengthy discussion about how courts often have to do the best they can with the evidence before them, however inadequate it may be. None of this is new, but it will be happy reading to claimants in any competition case. The court may have to “do the best it can upon the basis of exiguous evidence” [47], “resort to informed guesswork” [48], use the “broad axe” [51], and “do the best it can on the available evidence” [54]. The upshot of all of this is that, at [54]:

“There is nothing in the statutory scheme for collective proceedings which suggests […] [that] a case which has not failed the strike out or summary judgment tests should nonetheless not go to trial because of difficulties in the quantification of damages.”

In other words, and avoiding Lord Briggs’s triple negative, the only merits or evidential thresholds which must be met at the outset of a claim are the strike out and summary judgment tests. And even that overstates the position somewhat, because the Supreme Court also makes clear that the strike out and summary judgment tests are not an integral part of the certification process itself, and they would only arise if the defendant had actually sought strike out or summary judgment (see [59]).

The meaning of “suitability”

There is also an important wider point that comes out of Lord Briggs’s judgment.

If you take the view, as Lord Briggs does, that claims for collective proceedings should not face any hurdles that would not be faced in ordinary civil claims, then it is not immediately clear what the Tribunal is meant to be doing when it asks whether the claims are “suitable” for collective proceedings. If I issued a new claim this afternoon I would not have to show that it was “suitable” to go to trial, so on what basis is the Tribunal meant to decide whether claims are “suitable” for collective proceedings?

The answer is that “suitable” in s.47B(6) of the Act means “suitable to be brought in collective proceedings rather than individual proceedings”. As Lord Briggs explains at [56]:

“This is because collective proceedings have been made available as an alternative to individual claims, where their procedure may be supposed to deal adequately with, or replace, aspects of the individual claim procedure which have been shown to make it unsuitable for the obtaining of redress at the individual consumer level for unlawful anti-competitive behaviour.”

Similarly, where the word “suitable” is used in Rule 79(2)(f) (the Tribunal must consider “whether the claims are suitable for an aggregate award of damages”) it means “suitable for an award of aggregate rather than individual damages”. At [57] Lord Briggs suggests that the main issue in this regard will be one of proportionality, by which I think he means whether the benefit of securing individualized compensation is worth the costs that such an exercise would involve.

This approach to suitability, which is an important aspect of Lord Briggs’s analysis, is also the heart of the reason for Lords Sales and Leggatt’s dissent. Lord Sales summarises their view at [118]:

“it does not follow that, because collective proceedings are an alternative to conventional proceedings brought by or on behalf of individuals, they are intended to be available in any case where they would be less unsatisfactory than such individual proceedings. As we have noted, collective proceedings confer substantial legal advantages on claimants and burdens on defendants which are capable of being exploited opportunistically. In the absence of wording which says so, we cannot accept that demonstrating that the members of the proposed class would face greater difficulties pursuing their claims individually must be regarded as sufficient to justify allowing their claims to be brought as a collective proceeding, with the advantages that this confers. Such an approach would very significantly diminish the role and utility of the certification safeguard.”

The wider consequences

The benefits of the Merricks judgment will not be limited to large-scale consumer claims. In a wide range of cases the applicant will be able to say that it would be better for the claims to be brought as collective proceedings, and perhaps also for there to be an aggregate award, than for individual claimants to be left to bring their own claims.

In future cases, the Tribunal is likely to look at three main factors to decide whether the claims are suitable for certification (at least on an opt-out basis). First and most obviously, the lower the damage suffered by any individual class member, the more suitable the claims will be for collective proceedings.

Secondly, there is the question of how ‘individualised’ the damage is. As Merricks demonstrates, having highly individualised loss is not a bar to certification. It is, however, a factor that will be placed in the balance. This could be a particular issue if, for example, the proposed claimant class is made up of companies which have themselves passed on the overcharge in different amounts to their own customers. There is no reason in principle why a class of that nature could not receive compensation through an opt-out collection action, but it will be somewhat more difficult to persuade the Tribunal that it is the suitable procedure.

Thirdly, where a claim involves issues which are not common to the class, that may also be a factor leaning against certification. In particular, it may be inefficient for the claims to be tried collectively simply for the purpose of resolving the limited common issues.

There are several grey areas. One is the extent to which, when the Tribunal asks whether it would be better for the claims to be brought as collective proceedings versus individually, it can take account of the possibility of other means of challenge. Lord Briggs’s focus is on the kind of small value consumer claim typified by Merricks, where one can say with confidence that no individual will want to run up enormous costs to vindicate their claim. At the other end of the spectrum there will be high value individual claims which could be brought by large companies with deep pockets. But in between those two extremes, a reasonable number of competition damages claims are brought by companies acting together to vindicate their rights whilst minimising their exposure to costs. It is open to argument whether, on Lord Briggs’s approach, the Tribunal could decide that although a proposed class of claimants might not each individually bring their own claim, it would be preferable for them to get together into groups to bring claims; or perhaps for one claim to proceed as a test claimant; or perhaps for collective proceedings to be brought on an opt-in rather than an opt-out basis.

Another uncertainty is whether the Tribunal could take into account the degree of estimation that the proposed collective proceedings would require. This is something of a knotty point. The Supreme Court has emphasised that the court’s role is to assess damages in a broad-brush way, and it therefore sets a strong tone against refusing certification simply on the grounds that the collective proceedings will require damages to be estimated. However, it is worth noting that one factual feature of the Merricks case was that the applicants’ expert said that the process of working out aggregate damages in that case would be the same as the process which would be required if any individual had brought a case. That will not be the case in every proposed collective action. Take, for example, a case where the proposed claimant class is made up of companies which have passed on the overcharge in different amounts to their own customers. If one of those claimants were to bring its own claim then the Tribunal would be able to assess the degree of pass-on by that company using the company’s own data. In contrast, if collective proceedings were brought for the whole class of claimants then the process of estimating damages would be likely to be far more broad-brush. It is open argument whether the defendant could say, in such a case, that it is unfair for damages to be determined on such a broad-brush basis when they could be determined in a more tailored way, if class members were to bring their own claims.

The Pride case gives another interesting example of the grey areas. What happened in that case, in summary, was that certification was refused because the Tribunal decided that the binding findings in the infringement decision did not support the full breadth of the theory of harm that was being advanced. The Tribunal essentially invited the applicant to return with a smaller class, but instead the applicant withdrew the application. It is interesting to ask whether, if the Tribunal had applied the approach now endorsed in Merricks, it would have rejected the application. The Tribunal’s analysis involved delving into the economic evidence, and testing the strength of the legal case, which is probably not something that would happen post-Merricks. But on the other hand, it seems likely that the respondent could have achieved the same result by making a strike out or summary judgment application to be heard at the same time as the application for certification. Similar issues, raising questions of mixed fact and law, are likely to arise in other collective action cases, and it therefore seems likely that strike out or summary judgment applications will be an additional feature of future certification hearings.

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Tagged as collective actions, collective proceedings order, competition law blog, mastercard, merricks, supreme court

by Tristan Jones | April 16, 2019 · 8:11 pm

Merricks v MasterCard: Collective Actions Reinvigorated

The Court of Appeal today gave its much-anticipated judgment in the application to bring collective proceedings against MasterCard: see Merricks v MasterCard Incorporated and others [2019] EWCA Civ 674. It is a major victory for the Applicant and will reinvigorate the collective proceedings regime, which has seen disappointingly few cases brought since its introduction in 2015. Continue reading →

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Tagged as class actions, collective actions, competition law blog, mastercard, merricks, pride

by Tristan Jones | February 19, 2019 · 9:36 pm

Retrospective interpretation: DSG v MasterCard

The latest battle over limitation in Competition damages claims was a victory for the claimants – see DSG Retail Ltd v MasterCard Inc [2019] CAT 5. In some ways it is a surprising decision, because the Competition Appeal Tribunal has decided that when s.47A of the Competition Act was enacted in 2003, certain claims which were time-barred prior to its enactment were revived. The Tribunal frankly acknowledged that it did not find the matter straightforward, and looking at the rules it is easy to see why.

It used to be the case that competition damages claims could only be brought in the civil courts, where they would be subject to the usual six-year limitation rule (subject to extensions in various circumstances which need not concern us here). In 2003 a new route was introduced: claimants became entitled bring follow-on claims in the CAT under s.47A, which had its own bespoke limitation regime. That regime included this provision, which was found in rule 31(4) of the 2003 CAT Rules:

“No claim for damages may be made if, were the claim to be made in proceedings brought before a court, the claimant would be prevented from bringing the proceedings by reason of a limitation period having expired before the commencement of section 47A.”

Rule 31(4) was dropped when the rules were revised in 2015. The position now is that claimants can still bring s.47A follow-on claims, including for periods pre-2015, but such claims are no longer subject to rule 31(4). The Tribunal had to decide the related questions of what the consequence was of dropping rule 31(4), and what the rule meant in the first place.

The most obvious interpretation of rule 31(4) is that claimants could not bring follow-on claims under s.47A if the claims would have been time-barred in 2003 when s.47A was introduced. Thus, if an infringement lasted from 1993 to 2003 (and assuming that it was not deliberately concealed), the claimants could have brought a s.47A claim for damages going back as far as 1997 but no earlier. That would make good sense because it would mean that the introduction of the s.47A regime did not ‘revive’ claims that had otherwise expired.

The main problem with that ‘obvious’ interpretation is that it would lead to very strange consequences when, in 2015, rule 31(4) was dropped. One possibility is that the effect of dropping rule 31(4) was that, all of a sudden and for no apparent reason, from 2015 claimants were allowed to bring claims for damages which were time-barred in 2003 and which had remained time-barred until 2015. That would be very surprising. The only way to avoid such a result would be to say – and this is essentially what MasterCard said – that the rules should continue to be applied as if rule 31(4) still applies. But that is an ambitious argument given that the rule was deliberately dropped.

The Tribunal resolved these problems by deciding that what I have called the ‘obvious’ reading of rule 31(4) is wrong. In fact, the Tribunal held, rule 31(4) required one to ask whether the entire proceedings would have been time-barred in 2003 when s.47A was introduced. If the answer is that the proceedings would not have been time-barred, because some of the damage was still within the limitation period, then the claimants could have started s.47A follow-on proceedings for the entire loss. Thus, to take my example of an infringement lasting from 1993 to 2003, the fact that the 1997-2003 period was not limitation-barred in 2003 meant that claimants were entitled to start s.47A proceedings for the entire 1993-2003 period. Section 47A therefore did, in this limited sense, revive claims that had otherwise expired.

This approach to rule 31(4) has the particular attraction of enabling one to explain why the rule was dropped in 2015. The explanation, according to the Tribunal, is a practical one: it is extremely unlikely that there will be an infringement decision after 2015 which relates to damages which were entirely limitation-barred in 2003. Thus, rule 31(4) is no longer practically necessary; the problem with which it was concerned will no longer arise.

The upshot of all of this is that the Tribunal has decided that rule 31(4) never prevented claimants from pursuing claims going back as far as 1993 (or earlier), provided that some part of the damage was suffered in or after 1997, and the fact that rule 31(4) has now been dropped is entirely understandable and makes no practical difference. Claims can still be brought going back to 1993 (or earlier). It is undoubtedly a neat solution.

On the other hand, consider this. It seems pretty unlikely that any claimant who had brought a claim in, say, 2004, or 2014, would have been able to persuade the Tribunal that the 2003 rules had revived claims that were otherwise time-barred. It is only because the rule was revoked in 2015, and because the Tribunal used the fact of revocation as being relevant to its meaning when originally enacted, that the Tribunal interpreted the rule in the way that it did. Thus, claims which were time-barred in 2003, and which would probably have been treated as time-barred up until 2015, are now to be treated as having been revived in 2003. That may well be the least bad interpretation of the regime, but one can well understand why the Tribunal did not find the matter at all easy.

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Tagged as competition appeal tribunal, competition law blog, damages, dsg, limitation, mastercard

by Tristan Jones | January 19, 2019 · 11:59 pm

Subsidiarity liability: Biogaran

I wrote a blog a few months ago on the circumstances in which a subsidiary can be held liable for the infringing conduct of its parent. That is a somewhat special interest subject which might be said to have received more than its fair share of attention among English judges and lawyers. However, I cannot resist a short update to point out that the issue has recently received attention from the EU General Court.

The context was a clutch of appeals relating to the Commission’s decision on ‘pay-for-delay’ settlements relating to patents owned by the French pharmaceutical company Servier. One of the addressees of the decision was Biogaran, a 100% Servier subsidiary. One of Biogaran’s grounds of appeal – which was rejected – was that the Commission had wrongly held it liable for an infringement carried out by its parent.

The judgment is not as clear as one might have hoped, and it is also not yet available in English. However, two points are tolerably clear.

The first point is that the General Court considered that a subsidiary may be liable for an infringement even if does not itself have the knowledge that is ordinarily required to find an infringement: see [223]-[225]. That said, it appears that Biogaran did have at least some knowledge, so the precise limits of the court’s analysis are open to debate.

The second point relates to implementation. Some parts of the Court’s judgment may be read as suggesting that a subsidiary may be liable even if it has played no role in the implementation of the infringement. Other parts may be read as meaning that the subsidiary must play a role in implementation but that it can be relatively minor: at [225] the Court refers to implementation “even in a subordinate, accessory or passive manner.”

So Biogaran is unlikely to be the final word on this issue. It does, however, tilt the balance more firmly in favour of subsidiary liability than some English judges might be comfortable with.

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Tagged as attribution, competition, competition law blog, subsidiary

by Tristan Jones | September 7, 2018 · 10:32 am

Anchoring claims to a UK subsidiary

The recent decision of the High Court in Vattenfall AB v Prysmian SpA [2018] EWHC 1694 (Ch) is another example of claimants being allowed to use non-addressee English subsidiaries as anchor defendants for their competition damages claims. It is also another example of the court considering but not actually having to decide the interesting legal points around attribution of liability which potentially arise in such cases.

There have now been several cases with the same basic structure: the European Commission decides that a company is liable for a competition law infringement and some claimants then start proceedings against that company’s English subsidiary in order to establish jurisdiction in England. The defendant objects to the claimants’ attempt to sue an entity which was not, after all, an addressee of the Commission’s decision simply to use it as a means of bringing proceedings in London.

The problem which defendants face in such a scenario, and the reason why they keep losing these cases, is that it is relatively easy for claimants to allege that the English subsidiary was knowingly involved in the infringement. If the Commission has found that there was an EU-wide infringement then it will often be entirely proper for the claimants to infer, at least sufficiently to meet the low threshold for establishing jurisdiction, that the infringement was implemented in England through the English subsidiary. In Vatenfall the claimants had the additional benefit of being able to point to concrete evidence in support of their knowing implementation plea. Provided that such a plea is properly made, a standalone claim can be run against the English subsidiary which can then be used as the anchor defendant.

The more interesting legal question is what the position would be if a claimant cannot properly plead a standalone case of knowing implementation against the English subsidiary. Could the parent’s liability be attributed to the subsidiary so that the subsidiary can be sued and used as an anchor defendant even though it was not involved in the cartel? The English judges who have considered this question have expressed different views about it.

One view is that the answer is that liability can be attributed from an infringing subsidiary to its parent company but not the other way round. Supporters of this view point to the fact that, when discussing attribution of liability in the line of cases starting with Akzo Nobel NV v European Commission [2009] 5 CMLR 23, the European Courts have been concerned only with imputing liability to a parent company, and that they only permit such attribution if the parent exercised a ‘decisive influence’ over the infringing subsidiary.

The problem, however, is that the reasoning in the Akzo Nobel line of cases is expressed in quite wide-reaching terms. The basic logic is that if the parent and subsidiary are part of the same single economic unit then they form a single undertaking, and that if an undertaking infringes competition law then all of its legal entities are liable for the breach. The ‘decisive influence’ test is really about determining whether the parent and subsidiary are part of the same economic unit, not an additional threshold for the attribution of liability between companies which are in the same economic unit.

Thus the alternative view is that the liability can be attributed between any and all companies in the same undertaking. This has caused some consternation among English judges because of its apparently wide-reaching consequences. Does it mean that liability could be attributed to a subsidiary with no knowledge of or involvement in a cartel? Or even from one subsidiary to another?

In the Sainsbury’s case ([2016] CAT 11) at [363] the CAT suggested something of a compromise: liability could be attributed between companies in the same undertaking but only if they had “in some way” participated in the breach or otherwise exercised a decisive influence over a company which did. That is a sensible solution, but it might be said that it still sits somewhat uncomfortably with the reasoning in Akzo Nobel.

A different way of formulating the point might be as follows. In accordance with the reasoning in Akzo Nobel, liability can always be attributed between companies in the same undertaking. However, when asking whether companies are in the same “undertaking” one needs to keep in mind that the identification of an undertaking depends on the circumstances. In a competition infringement case, the question is whether the companies acted as a single economic unit for the purposes of the infringement. If they did then they are all part of the same undertaking and they are all liable. If they did not then they are not part of the relevant undertaking and liability cannot be attributed to them from any other company in the group.

If this approach is correct then a subsidiary which genuinely had nothing to do with an infringement will not be liable for it. But a subsidiary which, whether knowingly or not, acted in concert with other group companies such that they operated as a single economic unit to implement an infringement will be liable for it. That is essentially (with slightly different reasoning) the approach which appealed to the CAT in Sainsbury’s, and it is a solution which avoids some of the extremes of other proposed solutions.

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Tagged as anchor defendant, competition law, competition law blog, provimi, vattenfall

by Dominic Howells | December 5, 2017 · 12:52 am

Market dynamics in the counterfactual: more competitive, not just cheaper

The judgment of Phillips J in Sainsbury’s v Visa [2017] EWHC 3047 (Comm) demonstrates the importance to claimants in competition damages cases of identifying a counterfactual which not only involves lower prices but also involves higher levels of competition.

Sainsbury’s case

Visa’s payment card scheme required ‘acquirers’ (who process card payments on behalf on merchants) to pay an ‘interchange fee’ to the issuer of a payment card whenever a payment was made. All acquirers were required to accept all cards issued in the scheme (the so-called honour all cards rule or ‘HACR’). All issuers were required to remit to the acquirer the whole of the payment made by the customer, less the applicable interchange fee (this was called the ‘settlement at par’ rule). Acquirers passed on all of the interchange fees to merchants, as part of the merchant service charge which also included an element of profit margin for acquirers.

Visa set a default interchange fee (the multilateral interchange fee or ‘MIF’), though acquirers and issuers were free to negotiate different fees bilaterally. However, no acquirer had an incentive to agree to pay more, and no issuer had an incentive to agree to accept less than the MIF. The settlement at par rule prevented issuers from, in effect, forcing a higher interchange fee on acquirers by remitting customer payments at a discount. The HACR prevented acquirers with market power from forcing lower interchange fees on issuers by refusing to accept cards unless bilateral interchange fees were agreed.

The combined effect of these rules was to eliminate any competition as to the level of interchange fees. This was Sainsbury’s case and Visa accepted that these arrangements constituted a restriction of competition ‘in absolute terms’: [103-104].

Sainsbury’s proposed counterfactual, which the court accepted, was one in which there was no MIF set by Visa, but the settlement at par rule and HACR remained in force: [98]. This, in effect, amounted to a MIF of zero and the same dynamics between issuers and acquirers as existed in the factual would have prevented bilateral interchange fees from being agreed in the counterfactual: [126-129]. It followed that on Sainsbury’s counterfactual, the interchange fees paid would have been lower but not because of any re-introduction of competition in the setting of such fees. The suite of rules which had operated to eliminate competition in the factual would operate in the same way and with the same result in the counterfactual, just at different prices: [161]. Sainsbury’s claim therefore failed as it had not established that its loss was caused by a reduction in competition.

What went wrong?

Sainsbury’s counterfactual retained two key elements from the factual scheme: the settlement at par rule and the HACR. All parties agreed that the scheme would be unworkable if it incorporated the HACR but did not require settlement at par: [99]. Such a scheme would be equivalent to allowing issuers to set interchange fees unilaterally, by settling payments at a discount. Assuming acquirers continued to pass interchange fees on to merchants in full, this would result in merchants ceasing to accept Visa, as continued participation in the scheme would mean accepting all card payments regardless of the fee charged.

The parties do not appear, however, to have explored the possibility of a truly bilateral system in which neither the settlement at par rule nor the HACR applied. In a counterfactual from which both of these rules were absent, issuers and acquirers would have been forced to negotiate terms of settlement bilaterally. Issuers would have wished to agree a higher interchange fee (or a larger discount from par) but would have been prevented from demanding too high a fee because of the risk that acquirers (in order to retain merchant business) would cease to accept a certain issuer’s cards.

This counterfactual involves a radical departure from the Visa scheme in the factual, but the market dynamic which would result is familiar: this is how competition works in so-called three-party schemes, such as American Express. The issuer faces competing incentives: higher fees make for greater profits per transaction, but too high fees reduce card acceptance by merchants and reduce transaction volume, ultimately reducing the appeal of the card to customers.

The outcome in this counterfactual could be a patch-work of differing fees charged by different issuers with corresponding variances in merchant acceptance. There are over 50 issuers and around 30 acquirers in the UK[1], which would give rise to a large (but in principle manageable) number of bilateral negotiations assuming the same number of issuers existed in the counterfactual. There may be good reason, however, to think that there would be fewer issuers in the counterfactual: If the setting of MIFs inhibited competition and raised issuer profits, it is likely also to have encouraged more issuers to enter the market than could have been sustained in a competitive scenario. Lower interchange fees, lower profits, the requirement to negotiate deals with all (or almost all) acquirers and the need to reassure prospective customers that the card would be widely accepted would all act to restrain the number of viable issuers in the counterfactual.

Merchants now indicate whether they accept Amex or Diners. Before the emergence of four-party schemes in the UK, merchants indicated whether they accepted Barclaycard, a card issued only by the bank of the same name. In the counterfactual described here, merchants would be required to indicate which of the major banks’ and independent issuers’ cards they accepted.

Of payment cards and dog races: monopoly and monopsony in price setting

Competition within the Visa scheme was inhibited by the fact that fees were set centrally for all participants. The scheme was controlled by participating issuing banks, so central price setting tended to result in higher fees. If merchants (or acquirers who did not also issue cards) had controlled the scheme, the result might have been that low or even negative interchange fees were set, but the result would have been no more competitive. The mischief against competition was the setting of prices centrally; control over the scheme determined which party stood to gain.

In Bookmaker’s Afternoon Greyhound Services [2009] LLR 584, cited by Phillips J at [91], the boot was on the other foot. Whereas in the Visa scheme, prices were set by or on behalf of the party receiving payment, in the BAGS case, prices were set by the paying party, which was controlled by the leading bookmakers, and which had a monopsony on buying live television footage from racecourses. When a group of racecourses jointly agreed to sell their footage exclusively through a newly formed distributor, prices for footage rose and BAGS claimed that the racecourses had acted anti-competitively. On the contrary, the court found, the market power of BAGS had been reduced and competition had been increased. As Phillips J pointed out in Sainsbury’s, the BAGS case shows the pitfalls of a facile analysis which equates price decreases with increases in competitive intensity and vice-versa.

It ought to be possible for the payment card market to operate competitively given the large number of retailers, banks and other issuers. Where collective price-setting is interposed between the parties on each side of the transaction, there is an obvious possibility of distortions to competition. It was common ground in Sainsbury’s that the Visa scheme as implemented had eliminated competition in the setting of interchange fees: [103-104]. A claimant seeking damages for the setting of payment card interchange fees should ask the court to consider a simple counterfactual, in which these distortions are eliminated: What would the result have been if the parties on each side had decided whether to transact with one-another and on what terms, without the central setting of prices or a compulsion to transact?

[1] In Arcadia v MasterCard [2017] EWHC 93 (Comm), at [103] Popplewell J found that there were 55 MasterCard issuers in 2015 in the UK; it is assumed that there were a similar number of Visa issuers.

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by Natasha Simonsen | August 4, 2017 · 5:33 pm

Collective (in)action? The CAT’s recent judgments on collective proceedings orders

At first glance, two recent judgments from the CAT may give the impression that the new UK class action regime is dead in the water. However, on closer inspection there is much in these judgments that prospective claimants will welcome.

The first decision was in the Pride mobility scooters case (see Tom Coates’ blog here). The CAT made clear that it might have been prepared to grant a collective proceedings order (“CPO”), but on a basis so narrow that the claimants chose not to proceed. In the second decision, Merricks v Mastercard Inc & Ors [2017] CAT 16, the CAT rejected the CPO application, bringing an end to what would have been an extraordinarily ambitious claim—on behalf of 46.2 million people, seeking aggregate damages of approximately £14 billion, for Mastercard’s unlawful setting of fallback multilateral interchange fees in breach of Article 101 TFEU.

Under the new provisions in s.47B of the Competition Act 1998, a CPO application must satisfy the CAT of two criteria. They are, in brief, that (i) the person bringing the proceedings is an appropriate representative of the class of claimants, and (ii) the claims are eligible for inclusion in collective proceedings.

In Merricks, as in Pride, the applicants succeeded on the first criterion but failed on the second. The CAT adopted a relatively liberal approach to certifying the class representative in both cases: a former ombudsman and consumer protection advocate in Merricks (§§93-94), and an advocate for pensioners’ rights in Pride (§§125-139).

The CAT was also satisfied with the litigation funding arrangements in both cases (Pride, §§140-145; Merricks, §§95-140); although it strongly criticised the “impenetrable” drafting of the American-style funding agreement in Merricks, and was only prepared to approve it in light of amendments proposed at the hearing: §§121-127. Prospective claimants will welcome the fact that, in neither Pride nor in Merricks was the CAT unduly concerned by the prospect of a shortfall between the applicants’ costs cover and respondents’ likely costs.

Where both claims failed, however, was on the eligibility criterion. This second criterion is further broken down in rule 80 of the CAT Rules 2015, which provides that claims will be eligible for inclusion in collective proceedings where they (a) are brought on behalf of an identifiable class of persons; (b) raise common issues; and (c) are suitable to be brought in collective proceedings.

In both cases, the CAT was prepared to accept that the claims were brought on behalf of an identifiable class of persons. In Pride that conclusion was uncontroversial, given that the class was defined as “any person who purchased a new Pride mobility scooter other than in the course of a business in the UK between 1 February 2010 and 29 February 2012” (§§5, 85). In Merricks, however, the CAT’s apparent acceptance of the class was no small matter. The class included all individuals who were over 16 years old at the time of the transaction, resident in the UK, and who purchased goods or services from UK businesses which accepted MasterCard cards, at any time over a 16 year period (§1). This included more than 46 million potential claimants; and yet, the CAT was untroubled by the “identifiable class” criterion.

As to the requirement that the claims raise common issues, in both cases the CAT emphasised that the appropriate approach was that followed in Canada, rather than the much stricter approach in the United States (Merricks, §58; Pride, §105). Although only three of the six issues in Merricks could properly be regarded as common, the CAT considered that to be sufficient.

In Pride, the applicant faced the difficulty of proving causation in circumstances where the regulator had focused on a small sample of infringing agreements (“the low-hanging evidential fruit”: §109), and the claimants were time-barred from pursuing anything other than a follow-on claim for the infringement (§110). The CAT’s decision on this issue may well create difficulties for other follow-on vertical infringement claims, but that category of claims is likely to be quite narrow.

In Merricks, the CAT was concerned about the methodology by which the applicant proposed to assess individual losses. The methodology needed to distinguish between three sets of issues: “individuals’ levels of expenditure; the merchants from whom they purchased; and the mix of products which they purchased” (§88). Regrettably, there had been “no attempt to approximate for any of those in the way damages would be paid out” (§88). The CAT observed that the experts’ oral evidence in response to questions from the Tribunal was “considerably more sophisticated and nuanced than that set out, rather briefly, in their Experts’ Report” (§76), but it still could not be satisfied that the damages sought would broadly reflect “the governing principle of damages for breach of competition law”, that is, “restoration of the claimants to the position they would have been in but for the breach” (§88). The judgment sounds a valuable warning to future claimants of the necessity for a detailed and precise methodology for calculating both individual and aggregate losses.

The CAT showed little sympathy for the applicant’s argument that refusing the CPO would result in a vast number of individuals who suffered loss going uncompensated, since there was no realistic prospect of claimants pursuing Mastercard individually. The CAT observed shortly that this was “effectively the position in most cases of widespread consumer loss resulting from competition law infringements” (§91).

The judgments in Pride and Merricks provide important guidance on the CAT’s likely approach to CPOs in future. In spite of the outcomes in both cases, the CAT’s ready acceptance of the proposed class representatives, its flexibility in regard to litigation funding, and its affirmation of the Canadian approach to collective action, are all likely to give heart to prospective claimants. Further, the judgment in Merricks leaves the door open to mass claims in the future, while signalling the heightened importance which expert evidence on calculating losses is likely to assume in such cases.

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by Tom Coates | April 28, 2017 · 11:42 am

Illegal counterfactuals: the Court of Appeal shuts the back door

Suppose a defendant to a competition claim runs a defence that, in the counterfactual world in which no anticompetitive conduct occurred, pricing would have been no different; and that the claimant replies, “maybe so, but only because you were at the same time operating some independent anti-competitive scheme, which must also be purged from the counter-factual”. Can the claimant amend his claim to plead the independent anti-competitive scheme raised in his Reply as the basis for a new substantive claim even where it would ordinarily be time-barred?

In February last year, Barling J appeared to answer, “Yes”, in a judgment given in the MasterCard litigation. On one view, the curious result of that judgment was that a claimant could apparently circumvent limitation rules by introducing a time-barred allegation of unlawfulness in his Reply, then using that as a basis to apply to amend his original claim. In other words, when a limitation point blocked the front door, claimants could still bring in new claims through the back.

The Court of Appeal, however, has now shut this back door, by overturning the High Court’s judgment. For the background to the judgments, and the details of Barling J’s decision, see my previous post here.

The issue before the Court was whether or not the new claim, premised on MasterCard’s Central Acquiring Rule (CAR) arose out of the same or substantially the same facts as the existing claim, premised on MasterCard’s Multilateral Interchange Fees (MIFs) (see CPR 17.4 and section 35(5) of the Limitation Act 1980). If it did, the Court could permit an amendment notwithstanding that it was time-barred. Barling J had held that it did on the following two grounds: first, the existing claim would already require an investigation into and evidence on the CAR; and, secondly, the claimants’ reply had pleaded that the CAR was unlawful and had to be excised from MasterCard’s counterfactual – so the new claim arose out of facts already in issue with respect to the existing claim.

The Court of Appeal disagreed with Barling J on both scores. Sales LJ said that the facts underlying each claim could not be said to be the same because the counterfactual inquiry required by each claim was so different (§46). On the existing claim, the counterfactual world was one in which the MasterCard rules in dispute (principally the MIFs) were excised but the CAR remained in place. On the new claim, however, the Court would have to investigate both the counterfactual world in which the MasterCard rules were excised as well as the CAR and the counterfactual world in which all the MasterCard rules remained in place but the CAR was excised.

Sales LJ, doubting the obiter comments of Waller LJ in Coudert Brothers v Normans Bay Ltd [2004] EWCA Civ 215, further said that the claimants could not introduce the new claim by pointing to their reply and saying that the CAR’s lawfulness was already in issue. The proper rule was that, where the defendant had pleaded facts by way of defence to the original claim, the claimant could introduce a new claim premised on those facts: Goode v Martin [2002] 1 WLR 1828. However, that was not the case here because MasterCard did not specifically rely on the CAR in its defence.

The Court of Appeal was further clearly motivated by a concern about the avoidance of limitation rules. Sales LJ said at §64:

“…it would be unfair to a defendant and would improperly subvert the intended effect of limitation defences set out in the Limitation Act if a claimant were to be able to introduce new factual averments in its reply (which are not the same as or substantially the same as what is already pleaded in the claim), after the expiry of a relevant limitation period, and then rely on that as a reason why it should be able to amend its claim with the benefit of the “relation back” rule to circumvent that limitation period.”

The curious result of Barling J’s judgment has therefore been reversed by the Court of Appeal. A claimant can no longer pull himself up by his own bootstraps; limitation now guards the back door as jealously as the front.

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by Tom Coates | April 6, 2017 · 10:12 am

Collective Proceedings in the CAT: mobility scooters roll on for now

Last Friday the CAT handed down a judgment on the first ever-application for a collective proceedings order under the new regime introduced by the Consumer Rights Act 2015. The judgment will generally be welcomed by potential claimants, but it has a sting in the tail which may cause serious difficulties for class actions in other vertical infringement cases.

The new collective proceedings regime, contained in section 47B CA98 and CAT Rules 75-98, was one of a suite of claimant-friendly measures aimed at improving the remedies for individual victims of competition infringements whose losses were low (other measures included, for example, the new fast-track procedure). Consistently with the regime’s objective, the CAT, although stopping short of reaching a final decision, said much about the scheme which will encourage claimants.

The proposed collective action is a follow-on claim against Pride, formerly the UK’s largest supplier of mobility scooters. The OFT (the national competition regulator) had found that Pride infringed the Chapter I prohibition by object by entering into 8 vertical agreements with retailers forbidding them from advertising mobility scooters online at prices below RRP. Those 8 agreements were in fact the result of a market-wide policy that Pride had been operating and which it had communicated to all of its retailers.

The key issues before the CAT were (broadly) the authorisation of Dorothy Gibson as the class representative (under section 47B(5) and CAT Rule 78), and certification of the claims for inclusion in collective proceedings on the basis that they raised common issues. On both issues, the CAT’s approach to the claimants was benevolent.

The CAT first dismissed the defendant’s preliminary objection. Pride pointed out that both the OFT decision and the underlying infringement pre-dated the introduction of the collective proceedings regime. On that basis, it fired a salvo of arguments based on Article 1 Protocol 1 of the ECHR, the EU Charter, and EU principles of legal certainty/legitimate expectations, the thrust of which was that the CAT should interpret the regime so as to disallow its “retrospective” application. The CAT shot down all these arguments in a comprehensive discussion that should see the end of any similar threshold points about collective proceedings applications.

The CAT also had little difficulty in authorising Ms Gibson as the class representative. Although not a mobility scooter consumer, her status as an advocate of pensioners’ rights (she is the chair of a representative body, the National Pensioner Convention), who had experienced lawyers, satisfied the CAT that she would act fairly and adequately in the interests of the class (§139; see CAT Rule 78(2)(a)). Moreover, the CAT was not concerned about her ability to pay Pride’s costs (see CAT Rule 78(2)(d)). Even though Ms Gibson’s ATE insurance cover level was less than Pride’s anticipated costs, the CAT stated shortly that those costs might not be reasonable or proportionate, so it would not be appropriate to disallow collective proceedings at that stage (§145).

The CAT’s approach to certification and commonality was also – in principle – liberal. Although it said that it could not “simply take at face value” (§102) the applicant’s expert evidence, it nonetheless rejected Pride’s submission that it should take a hyper-rigorous US-style attitude. Rather, the CAT endorsed the Canadian approach, approving at §105 the following comment of Rothstein J in Pro-Sys Consultants Ltd v Microsoft Corp [2013] SCC 57:

“In my view, the expert methodology must be sufficiently credible or plausible to establish some basis in fact for the commonality requirement. This means that the methodology must offer a realistic prospect of establishing loss on a class-wide basis so that, if the overcharge is eventually established at the trial of the common issues, there is a means by which to demonstrate that it is common to the class (i.e. that passing on has occurred). The methodology cannot be purely theoretical or hypothetical, but must be grounded in the facts of the particular case is question.”

The stumbling block for the claimants, however, was the CAT’s reasoning on the proper counterfactual. The claimants posited a world in which not only the 8 infringing vertical agreements were absent but also where Pride had operated no policy of prohibiting below-RRP advertising at all. The CAT, however, endorsed a narrower counterfactual from which only the specifically unlawful agreements (i.e. the 8 vertical agreements about which the OFT had made findings) were assumed to be absent (§112). With this narrower counterfactual, the CAT held that it was not clear whether there was sufficient commonality in the issues of loss, or whether the likely damages would justify the costs of collective proceedings. However, the CAT (again perhaps generously) did not dismiss the application altogether but rather adjourned it to enable the claimants’ expert to formulate a case on common loss on the basis of the revised counterfactual.

Notwithstanding the generally claimant-friendly approach, the CAT’s reasoning on the counterfactual could render other collective cases premised on vertical restraints very difficult in practice. In a large number of vertical restraint decisions, the infringer has adopted a market-wide policy but the regulator focuses, for practical reasons, on a small number of ‘implementations’ of the policy as the basis for its infringement findings. If one only excludes from the counterfactual the particular instances of unlawful implementation, rather than the more general policy which underlay them, the issues between class members may diverge: some will have been direct victims of the anti-competitive agreements, while others will have suffered only from what would have to be characterised as an “umbrella effect”. In addition, if claimants cannot proceed on the basis that the entire policy should be excluded from the counterfactual, the likely quantum may fall to a level where collective proceedings are not worth the candle. It remains to be seen whether the mobility scooter claimants will overcome these difficulties.

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by Emily Neill | August 3, 2016 · 5:07 pm

The passing-on “defence” after Sainsbury’s

The passing-on defence – ie. whether the damages suffered by a purchaser of a product which has been the subject of a cartel are reduced if he passes on the overcharge to his own customers – had, as Tristan Jones blogged a few years ago, been the subject of much policy discussion but relatively little legal analysis in the English case law.

That remained the position when the Competition Appeal Tribunal heard the claim in Sainsbury’s Supermarkets v Mastercard Incorporated and others [2016] CAT 11. The Judgment, handed down on 14 July, noted at §483 that there had been no case under English law substantively dealing with the pass-on defence. It represents the first English judgment which gives detailed consideration to the defence following full argument.

However, despite its length (running to some 300 pages), the Judgment leaves us with a number of big questions about the nature and scope of the defence.

The four key principles which emerge from the Judgment are as follows.

First, the Tribunal considered that the passing-on “defence” (their quotation marks) is no more than an aspect of the process of the assessment of damage. “The pass on “defence””, the Tribunal reasoned, “is in reality not a defence at all: it simply reflects the need to ensure that a claimant is sufficiently compensated and not overcompensated, by a defendant. The corollary is that the defendant is not forced to pay more than compensatory damages, when considering all of the potential claimants”(§484(3)). The “thrust of the defence” is to ensure that the claimant is not overcompensated and the defendant does not pay damages twice for the same wrong (§480(2)).

Second, the passing-on defence is only concerned with identifiable increases in prices by a firm to its customers and not with other responses by a purchaser such as cost savings or reduced expenditure. The Tribunal considered that although an economist might define pass-on more widely to include such responses (and there is a discussion of this in the Judgment at §§432-437), the legal definition of a passed-on cost differs because whilst “an economist is concerned with how an enterprise recovers its costs… a lawyer is concerned with whether or not a specific claim is well founded” (§484(4)).

Third, that the increase in price must be “causally connected with the overcharge, and demonstrably so” (§484(4)(ii)).

Fourth, that, given the danger in presuming pass-on of costs, “the pass-on “defence” ought only to succeed where, on the balance of probabilities, the defendant has shown that there exists another class of claimant, downstream of the claimant(s) in the action, to whom the overcharge has been passed on. Unless the defendant (and we stress that the burden is on the defendant) demonstrates the existence of such a class, we consider that a claimant’s recovery of the overcharge incurred by it should not be reduced or defeated on this ground” (emphasis original) (§484(5)).

But these principles leave a number of questions.

First, the Judgment firmly places the burden on defendant (and the importance of that is brought home when the Tribunal considered the issue of interest without this burden and, having found that Mastercard’s passing-on defence failed, nevertheless reduced the interest payable to Sainsbury’s by 50% because of passing-on). However, precisely what the Defendant has to demonstrate is less plain.

The Judgment refers to Mastercard’s passing-on defence failing because of a failure to show an increase in retail price (§485); language which reflects back to §484(4)(ii). But an increase in price is not the language used when the Tribunal states the test, and the Judgment leaves open whether demonstrating an increase in price would in itself be sufficient to satisfy the requirement to show the existence of “another class of claimant downstream of the claimant(s) in the action, to whom the overcharge has been passed on”.

Second, and similarly, there is no explanation of what the Tribunal means by the term “causally connected” (or, rather, “demonstrably” causally connected) when it refers to the need for the increase in price to be connected to the overcharge. It might be – as was suggested in our earlier blog – that, applying ordinary English principles of causation and mitigation, a party would need to show that the price increase or the benefit arises out of the breach. Given the Tribunal’s repeated statements that the defence is not really a defence at all but is simply an aspect of the process of the assessment of damages (§§480(2), 484(4)), such an approach would, at first blush, sit perfectly with the Judgment.

However, third, the Tribunal’s splitting of passing-on from other responses to an overcharge creates some confusion in this regard. Under the Tribunal’s approach cost savings are not to be considered under the passing-on defence (§484(4)) but must be considered under an analysis of mitigation (§§472-478). It is, however, difficult to separate out principles of mitigation and causation in this context. Indeed, the Tribunal, when discussing mitigation, expressly recognised that the issue is “akin to one of causation” (§475). But the Tribunal took pains to emphasise that an assessment of passing-on and mitigation are separate exercises, without explaining whether and if so in what way the test in the context of mitigation – said to be that the benefit must “bear some relation to” the damage suffered as a result of the breach (§475) – differs from that of causation in the passing-on defence.

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by Tristan Jones | June 9, 2016 · 9:57 pm

Economic complexity: CAT vs High Court

One of the advantages of the Competition Appeal Tribunal is said to be the fact that its three-member panel typically includes an economist. But is that really such a big advantage over the High Court?

The question is particularly topical in light of a couple of recent trends. On the one hand, recent legislative developments have increased the jurisdictional overlap between the CAT and the High Court, so that litigants more frequently face a choice between the two. In making that choice, the CAT’s economic expertise can exert a strong pull. Claimants might plead their case narrowly in order to come within its limited powers. Or, parties might seek to transfer their case across to the CAT from the High Court (not always successfully – see here).

On the other hand, there have been several indications that more could be done to make economic issues accessible to High Court Judges. A high-profile example is the recent Streetmap case, in which the experts gave evidence concurrently in a “hot tub” arrangement. Another example comes from the MasterCard litigation, in which Mr Justice Flaux recently asked whether it might help for the trial judge to be assisted by an expert economist appointed as an Assessor under CPR 35.15. I understand that the suggestion has not been taken any further in that particular case, but the general idea of using Assessors was also endorsed by another judge at a recent lecture on competition litigation.

Another tool which could be used much more widely in competition cases is the use of ‘teach-ins’ at which an independent expert spends time (perhaps a couple of days) educating the judge on the basic economic concepts relevant to the case. Care obviously needs to be taken to ensure that the teacher does not take a stance on controversial issues in the case. But if it is done well, as a recent patent case shows, it can be an invaluable way of helping a judge to prepare for a complex trial.

Of course, all of these techniques could be used in the CAT as well as in the High Court. It is perhaps too easy for parties in the CAT to assume that, just because there is an economist on the Panel, there is no need to do any more to make the economic issues accessible. The economist can only do so much, and the role does not include providing formal training to the other Panellists.

Against that background, it is worth revisiting the advantages of having an economist on the CAT Panel. The first is that he/she is fully involved in the hearing, and able to ask questions of the parties’ expert witnesses. Anyone who appears regularly in the CAT will have seen cases in which it is the economist Panellist who manages to cut through the arguments and identify the central point.

But there is no reason in principle why that advantage could not be replicated in the High Court. An Assessor could be appointed with the function of (among other things) asking question of the expert witnesses. In practice this would be an unusual request, and of course the parties would need to foot the bill. But there is no reason in principle why it could not be done.

The other main benefit of having an economist on the Panel is that he/she participates fully in the decision making. He works collaboratively, in private, with the other Panellists as they reach their decision. In contrast, if an Assessor were appointed in the High Court to help the judge reach a decision on the economic issues in the case, his advice would need to be given in public so that the parties could comment on it (see the Court of Appeal’s guidance at paragraphs 18-21 of this patent case). Such a process would be much more cumbersome than that in the CAT, but it would at least ensure that the parties could engage fully with the thinking of every economist involved in the case.

I do not mean to suggest that parties in economically complex cases should flock to the High Court rather than the CAT. But it is worth thinking hard before tailoring a case to fit within the CAT’s limited powers, or getting into a procedural fight over the forum. With a bit of imagination, and provided the parties are willing to pay for it, much can be done to assist the judge in the High Court to match many of the advantages available as a matter of course in the CAT.

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by Tom Coates | February 24, 2016 · 10:53 am

Illegal counterfactuals: bringing in new claims by the backdoor?

It is fairly well-established in competition cases that the hypothetical counterfactual – which, for the purposes of causation, posits what the situation would have been absent any breach of competition law – cannot contain unlawful elements: see e.g. Albion Water Ltd v Dwr Cymru [2013] CAT 6. In a normal case, C will claim damages, arguing – let’s say – that D abused a dominant position by imposing discriminatory prices. D defends the claim on the basis that, absent any abuse, it would have set prices at a certain (high) level. C replies that those prices too would have been discriminatory – i.e. the counterfactual is inappropriate.

In other words, the legality of the counterfactual normally becomes an issue when the defendant pleads a hypothetical scenario which C alleges to be unlawful. But consider a different situation. In this, D pleads by way of defence that prices would not have been any lower even without the alleged anti-competitive conduct. C replies that that is only the case because D was actually engaging in some separate anti-competitive conduct – about which it has made no complaints in its original claim. Is C entitled to raise this kind of a response to a counterfactual? The answer may well be yes, according to Barling J’s recent judgment in Deutsche Bahn AG and others v MasterCard Incorporation and others [2015] EWHC 3749 (Ch).

The context is the MasterCard litigation, in which various retailers are claiming that the multi-lateral interchange fees (MIFs) charged by MasterCard to banks breached Article 101 TFEU and caused them loss. Specifically, the MIFs inflated the charges (MSCs) that banks imposed on merchants in connection with processing MasterCard payments and distorted competition in that market.

One line of defence which MasterCard has adopted is that the MIFs did not have any material effect on some categories of MSCs. MasterCard specifically points to a period when the MIFs were set at zero and there was no consequent deflation in MSCs. The retailers riposted by pleading in their Reply that that was only because MasterCard was operating another different rule which was also anti-competitive (the “Central Acquiring Rule” or “CAR”) – absent this too, the Claimants say, MSCs would have fallen. The retailers had originally made no complaint about the CAR in their Particulars of Claim.

Not only this, but the retailers relied on their pleaded case on the CAR in their Reply to support an argument that they should be entitled to amend their Particulars to raise the CAR as a fresh and independent claim. Even though the CAR claim was arguably or partially time-barred, the fact that it appeared in the Reply meant that it “arose out of the same facts” as the original claim under CPR 17.4(2). The application to amend was the issue before Barling J. He granted it, accepting that it was an ‘arguable’ point which the Claimants were entitled to run in their Reply, that evidence on the CAR would therefore be needed, and that they could therefore also add it as a new claim under CPR 17.4(2).

There are perhaps three interesting points arising from the decision. The first is that it raises the prospect that in responding to a counterfactual, C can do more than simply say that the hypothetical conduct on which D relies is illegal. C can arguably go further – and claim that some other aspect of D’s actual conduct – not previously in issue – is also illegal and so must be purged from the counterfactual. This represents a departure from the kind of arguments run in Albion Water and Enron Coal Services Ltd v EW&S Railway Ltd [2009] CAT 36 – as Barling J himself recognized (§72) – although there are closer similarities with C’s argument in Normans Bay Ltd v Coudert Brothers [2004] EWCA Civ 215.

The second is that that kind of argument can seemingly be raised even though the conduct complained of is not specifically raised in the Defence. MasterCard had not pleaded that MSCs were not affected by the MIFs because of the CAR. But that did not prevent the retailers from raising the legality of the CAR in response to the counterfactual. The situation was therefore unlike that in the Norman Bay case – where D had pleaded in its counterfactual conduct which C claimed was itself negligent in its Reply.

The third is that the allegation of unlawfulness that C raises in its Reply may even be time-barred. And, if it is, the plea may allow C to argue that it should be able to amend its Particulars so as to include the substantive new claim on the basis that it is one which arises out of facts already in issue under CPR 17.4(2). Barling J rejected MasterCard’s submission that this was to allow the retailers to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. The retailers therefore succeeded in bringing a new claim into their Particulars through the “back door” of their Reply.

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by Tristan Jones | December 8, 2015 · 10:54 am

Standalone claims in the CAT: bypassing the transitional rules

We have written before about the problems inherent in the transitional provisions of the new Consumer Rights Act 2015 (see Tom de la Mare QC’s blog here). A recent decision from Mr Justice Barling in the Mastercard litigation places a (small) sticking plaster over some of the difficulties.

One problem is that the transitional provisions appear to severely limit claimants’ ability to bring stand-alone claims in the Competition Appeal Tribunal (“CAT”) – in theory you can bring such claims, but you may face much less favourable limitation rules than you would have faced had you started in the High Court. It is difficult to see this as anything other than a drafting error, since part of the purpose of the new statutory regime was to do away with the oddity of having a specialist competition tribunal unable to hear such claims.

Barling J has found a partial solution to this problem. In Sainsbury Supermarkets Ltd v MasterCard Incorporated [2015] EWHC 3472 (Ch) (see here), he decided that Sainsbury’s standalone claim, issued in the High Court, could be transferred to the CAT – and that, importantly, such a transfer would preserve the limitation position in the High Court.

The Judge held that it did not matter whether or not the claim could have been started in the CAT (and he did not decide that particular issue). What mattered was that it could be transferred there.

The ability to transfer standalone claims to the CAT has obvious advantages for those cases which would benefit from the CAT’s economic and industry expertise. It is somewhat clunky for claimants to have to issue in the High Court (and incur fees there) only to then transfer to the CAT, but it is better than nothing.

It also means that claimants who wish to take advantage of the different limitation provisions in the High Court (in general, better for standalone claims) and in the CAT (in general, better for follow-on) now have the option of starting claims in both jurisdictions and then seeking to consolidate them in the CAT.

Of course, Barling J’s decision does nothing to fix the other problems highlighted in Tom’s blog. Most obviously, it does nothing for standalone class actions, which cannot be started in the High Court and still face the usual problems in the CAT. It is, however, a helpful ‘workaround’ which will go some way towards mitigating the problems caused by the transitional arrangements.

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Tagged as CAT, competition law blog, damages, follow-on, section 47A, transitional provisions

by Tom Richards | October 15, 2015 · 12:46 pm

Blown out of the water? Air Cargo and the future of extra-EU/EEA cartel damages claims

If the captain of a trading ship fires cannon on a canoe to prevent the canoeists trading with another boat vying for their trade, that boat’s owners can sue the captain: Tarleton v M’Gawley (1793) Peake 270. An intention to gain where your gain must be another’s loss is an intention to injure the other for the purposes of the “unlawful means” economic torts: OBG v Allen [2007] UKHL 21, [63] per Lord Hoffmann, [164]-[167] per Lord Nicholls.

What if there are two other boats competing for the canoe’s business, and the captain doesn’t care which of them will lose out? In such a case there remains an intention to injure, even though one of the victims will in fact have suffered no loss, because ‘there is the intent to damage the identifiable and known class of two boats’, competition for the canoe’s business being ‘effectively a zero-sum game’. So the Court of Appeal accepted in its judgment yesterday [2015] EWCA Civ 1024 in the Air Cargo litigation at [168]-[169].

But swap cannon for cartels; increase the number of victims; change boats for air cargo shippers and freight forwarders; exeunt the canoeists and enter The Gondoliers. In W.H. Newson [2013] EWCA Civ 1377 (blogged here by Andrew Scott), Arden LJ waxed lyrically dismissive of a cartel victim’s argument that it formed part of a class of persons against whom the cartelists intended to injure: ‘When everybody is somebody, then nobody is anybody’, to quote, as she did, Gilbert & Sullivan. Now in Air Cargo the Court of Appeal has endorsed Arden LJ’s approach and affirmed the binding nature of the Newson decision. Because the immediate victims of a cartel, or those next in the supply chain, may be able to pass on their losses to others further down the chain, the cartelists cannot be said to be seeking to gain at their expense. And while the loss must ultimately be borne by someone, to expand the class of victims ‘to anyone in the chain down to the ultimate consumers’ would open up ‘an unknown and unknowable range of potential claimants’. See the Court of Appeal’s judgment at [169]. The Court on this basis (reversing a judgment of Peter Smith J discussed in a previous blog of mine) struck out the Air Cargo claimants’ economic tort claims.

This is significant. Tort claims at common law might allow cartel victims to recover damages in respect of losses which EU/EEA law claim provides no remedy, for example where particular anti-competitive behaviour falls outside the territorial scope of EU/EEA law (see the Court’s judgment at [120]). But the Court of Appeal at [174] made no secret of their pleasure, as a matter of policy, not to let the common law expand the scope of the remedies available to cartel victims under the law of the EU/EEA.

How then will claimants seek to recover such losses? There may be other routes to (some) recovery, such as the Air Cargo claimants’ “umbrella effect” argument, or claims based upon the competition law of foreign states which can be advanced in this jurisdiction (mentioned in the Court’s judgment at [157] and [120]). But the question of intention to injure in cartel claims must now be ripe for consideration by the Supreme Court. In particular, as Andrew Scott has remarked of Newson, pass-on appears to be attributed an unusual significance in this context. The captain of the Othello could not know whether the owners of the Tarleton would pass on their losses to others further down the chain, but he was liable nonetheless.

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Tagged as air cargo, british airways, cartel damages, unlawful means conspiracy

by Tom de la Mare | October 1, 2015 · 2:45 pm

PRIVATE ACTIONS: The CRA 2015 giveth; and the 2015 CAT Rules taketh away

Introduction

Today, on the 1^st October 2015, when we are supposed to be celebrating the brave new world of the Competition Act 1998 (“CA”) as amended by the Consumer Rights Act 2015 (“CRA”), cartelists and other competition law infringers up and down the land[1] must be rubbing their hands in glee at the transitional provisions contained in Rule 119 of the Competition Appeal Tribunal Rules 2015 (“the 2015 CAT Rules” or the “New Rules”).[2]

The glee stems from the fact that these transitional provisions are very broad in temporal and material scope and yet very narrow in terms of gateway they provide into the new promised lands of flexible standalone claims,[3] and of collective redress leading to effective enforcement of private damages claims. The problem, in essence is this: these transitional rules set in aspic for an unnecessarily long time the old CAT regime and all its manifest defects, defects which were the express cause for reform in the first place. Continue reading →

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Tagged as cartel, CAT, class action, consumer rights act, damages, private actions, transitional provisions

by Ravi S. Mehta | September 18, 2015 · 8:46 am

Arcadia v Visa revisited: the Court of Appeal takes a strict approach to limitation

Competition damages claims can be notoriously complex. According to the Court of Appeal, however, that is no reason to free them from the ordinary English rules of limitation – however strict those rules might be.

Unlike the large majority of European limitation rules, where time starts running from the date of the victim’s knowledge, the English rule under the Limitation Act 1980 (“LA 1980”) is that time starts running from the moment the wrong is done, unless the victim can show that the wrong was concealed from him. The claimants in Arcadia Group Brands Ltd & Ors v Visa Inc & Ors [2015] EWCA Civ 883 argued that various relevant facts had been concealed. Ultimately, their difficulty was that they did have sufficient facts available to them to plead their case. Continue reading →

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Tagged as arcadia, cartel, competition law blog, damages, follow-on, limitation, mastercard, visa

by Daniel Cashman | September 10, 2015 · 6:40 pm

Jurisdiction in competition damages actions: a first word from the CJEU

C-352/13 Cartel Damage Claims (CDC) Hydrogen Peroxide was the CJEU’s first judgment on the application of the Brussels I Regulation (44/2001) to competition damages claims. The case fell to be decided in the context of the EU’s various new measures to encourage private enforcement. The Advocate General was not convinced that this policy focus could be reflected in Brussels I – he considered that the Regulation was “not fully geared towards ensuring effective private implementation of the Union’s competition law” (at [8]). However, the CJEU embraced the challenge, and provided an interpretation of Brussels I that will do much to encourage private enforcement. Continue reading →

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Tagged as brussels regulation, cartel damages, CJEU, hydrogen peroxide

by Tristan Jones | April 29, 2015 · 11:18 pm

Recovering penalties from directors and employees: Safeway revisited

Can a company which has been fined for anticompetitive conduct seek to recover the fine from the directors and employees responsible by suing them for damages?

The question is moot in light of last week’s Supreme Court judgment in Jetivia SA and another v Bilta Ltd (in liquidation) and others [2015] UKSC 23, which casts some doubt on the Court of Appeal’s decision on this issue in Safeway Stores Ltd v Twigger [2010] EWCA Civ 1472. Continue reading →

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Tagged as agreements, breach of duty, hampshire land, illegality, jetivia, supreme court

by Guest Blogger | November 18, 2014 · 12:37 am

Applying interest in damages claims

The Competition Bulletin is pleased to welcome the latest in our series of blogs by Oxera Consulting on key economic concepts for competition lawyers. In this blog, Enno Eilts, a Senior Consultant, discusses issues connected with the calculation of interest in damages actions. Continue reading →

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Tagged as Article 101, cartel, damages, interest, private damages

by Tom Richards | November 2, 2014 · 11:24 pm

What’s the plot? Conspiracy and 19th Century comic opera (again)

Ever since Johnson v Moreton [1980] AC 37 (61E-G per Lord Hailsham: ‘we should have to adopt the carefree attitude of the Mikado…’), references to Gilbert and Sullivan have been gaining ground in the judgments of our higher Courts. When last year Arden LJ rejected the argument, advanced by the claimant victim of a cartel, that it suffices to establish the intention requirement for the tort of unlawful means conspiracy that the claimant forms part of a class of persons against whom a cartelist’s wrongful acts were targeted, she did so by reference to The Gondoliers:

‘it deprives the requirement of intent to injure of any substantial content. It is tantamount to saying it is sufficient that the conspirators must have intended to injure anyone who might suffer loss from their agreement. If I might say so, the submission is reminiscent of the circularity of words in the Gondoliers that “when everyone is somebody, then nobody is anybody”’.

(See W.H. Newson [2013] EWCA Civ 1377 at [41], blogged here by Andrew Scott). Continue reading →

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Tagged as air cargo, competition law blog, conspiracy, sausage rolls

by Ravi S. Mehta | October 31, 2014 · 10:25 am

“It’s too late baby, now it’s too late”: limitation, competition claims and knowledge

How much knowledge does a potential claimant need before time begins to run against a competition claim against a party alleged to have breached competition law? This was the key question addressed by Mr Justice Simon in the first case in which an English Court has had to consider the effect of s.32 of the Limitation Act 1980 (“LA”) in the context of a competition claim. Continue reading →

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Tagged as competition law blog, follow-on, limitation, mastercard, visa

by Eesvan Krishnan | October 30, 2014 · 11:24 am

High Court tests the limits of confidentiality in EC infringement decisions

The European Commission came in for some stern criticism from the High Court this week, in a case which looks set to test the boundaries of confidentiality in EC infringement decisions: see Emerald Supplies v BA [2014] EWHC 3515 (Ch).

The background is the 2010 EC decision fining BA and eleven other airlines a total of €800m for operating a global cartel for air freight services. Hundreds of claimants are seeking damages, and they sought disclosure of a copy of the decision – which, remarkably, has not yet been made public by the EC. Continue reading →

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Tagged as air cargo, competition law blog, confidentiality, emerald, european commission, pergan

by Guest Blogger | August 26, 2014 · 10:02 am

The Cost of Collusion

The Competition Bulletin is pleased to welcome a guest blog from Louise Freeman of King & Wood Mallesons LLP. Louise specialises in (among other things) complex competition litigation. In this blog, she addresses the implications of the recent CJEU decision in Case C‑557/12 Kone AG and others v ÖBB-Infrastruktur AG. Continue reading →

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by Tristan Jones | June 30, 2014 · 8:24 am

The English law of causation and the passing-on defence

One of the big questions of English competition law is whether there is such a thing as a “passing-on defence” – – i.e. whether the damages suffered by a purchaser of a cartelized product are reduced or mitigated if he “passes on” some of the overcharge to his own customers. Two follow-on damages actions were due to be heard this term, arising out of the synthetic rubber cartel and the gas insulated switchgear cartel, both of which raised the question of passing-on but both of which have now settled. Continue reading →

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Tagged as competition law blog, damages, follow-on, pass-on

by Tristan Jones | April 13, 2014 · 6:21 pm

Non-Appealing Cartelists Beware

Tucked away at the back of last week’s Supreme Court decision on time-limits for follow-on claims is a very important development for private competition actions.

The context is section 47A of the Competition Act 1998, a provision which has generated an extraordinary amount of litigation in view of the fact that it was intended to streamline private damages actions. Continue reading →

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Tagged as competition law blog, deutsche bahn, follow-on, infringement, morgan

by Guest Blogger | March 4, 2014 · 2:28 pm

Sharing Risk in Collective Actions

With legislation to introduce collective actions currently making its way through Parliament (see our previous blog here), we are pleased to welcome a guest blog from Elaine Whiteford of King & Wood Mallesons LLP and Oliver Gayner of Burford Capital (UK) Ltd. They highlight a litigation funding problem which will arise under the proposed new regime, and suggest an ingenious solution. Continue reading →

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Tagged as collective actions, competition law blog, damages based agreement

by Ravi S. Mehta | February 25, 2014 · 4:26 pm

“What’s in a Commission Decision?” and other lessons for national courts

In a decision of 13 February 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU”) added a little gloss to an otherwise well-trodden path in relation to the binding aspects of a Commission Decision. For instance, it is well established that assessments made in recitals to a decision “are not in themselves capable of forming the subject of an application for annulment” unless they are “the necessary support for its operative part” (see Case T-138/89 Nederlandse Bankiersvereniging and Nederlandse Vereniging van Banken v Commission [1992] ECR II-2181 at [31]). What of statements of position by the Commission subsequent to its Decision, e.g. in order to facilitate its enforcement at national level? Continue reading →

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Tagged as competition law blog, decision, mediaset, sincere cooperation, state aid

by Tristan Jones | January 14, 2014 · 4:39 pm

Competition round-up: January 2014

It is again time for a round-up of recent competition law developments which have caught our attention.

Most attention-grabbing of all was the European Commission’s genius/bizarre/inexplicable decision to publish a comic book which is probably best described as a bureaucrat’s fantasy. A young Commission official (Thomas) starts talking to a beautiful woman (Chloe) in an airport departure lounge. Instead of ignoring his slightly creepy advances, Chloe turns out to want nothing more than to hear about the Commission’s antitrust work. Indeed, when Thomas false-modestly suggests that he might be boring her, she insists she wants to hear more:

And so starts the most fascinating hour of Chloe’s life. I should thank the Legal Cheek blog for bringing this important piece of work to my attention. Continue reading →

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Tagged as competition law blog

by Andrew Scott | November 13, 2013 · 1:09 am

Conspiracy, the CAT, and the Court of Appeal: “Here is a case unprecedented” (The Gondoliers, Act 2)

In W.H. Newson Holding Limited & ors v IMI plc & ors [2013] EWCA Civ 1377, the Court of Appeal has made some important new law regarding the scope of section 47A of the Competition Act 1998 and the tort of common law conspiracy.

The Court upheld Roth J’s decision (on which see Tom Richards’ blog) that it is in principle possible to advance in the CAT a follow on claim based on common law conspiracy. However, it held that because the claim followed on from a Commission Decision which did not contain a specific finding that the Defendant intended to injure the Claimant, the cause of action could not be made out without inviting the CAT to make additional findings – an invitation which the CAT was bound to decline in the light of Enron 1 and Enron 2. Continue reading →

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Tagged as competition appeal tribunal, competition law blog, conspiracy, copper plumbing tubes, Emerson, follow-on, infringement, s.47A, section 47A

by Tristan Jones | November 4, 2013 · 9:58 am

Canadian Supreme Court: No such thing as passing on defence

On Thursday last week the Supreme Court of Canada handed down three much-anticipated judgments concerning indirect purchaser claims. The trio of cases point towards a distinctive, and in many respects more claimant-friendly, approach to class actions than that adopted in the US. They will therefore be essential reading for those preparing for the proposed new collective action regimes here in Europe.

Of even greater interest (from a European perspective) is the Court’s rejection of the passing-on defence – i.e. the defence that a claimant ‘passed on’ some or all of the unlawful overcharges to its own customers. In the large majority of European countries, including England, the courts have yet to decide whether to recognise such a defence (its existence was assumed but not debated in the Devenish case). Continue reading →

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