Small Antitrust in Europe?

That one - see below and here - is a big one... Are we going to close the blog and shift to other disciplines?

In the eighties, several  US law firms specialized in antitrust were forced to refocus their activities on other disciplines (such as complex litigation, IP law, etc.) as a result of the shutting down of antitrust enforcement under Reagan's administration.

"The European Union’s 50-year-old commitment to “undistorted competition” has been scrapped from a list of the bloc’s objectives in a French coup that lawyers argue could undermine Brussels’ fight against protectionism and illegal state aid.

Nicolas Sarkozy, French president, secured the change, on the eve of an already tense Brussels summit to allay concerns in his country that the EU has become too “Anglo-Saxon”.

The surprise move came as EU leaders gathered in Brussels to try to agree a revamped version of the bloc’s moribund constitutional treaty. The new text would update the Union’s rules and create a new EU president and foreign minister.

Mario Monti, the former EU competition commissioner who clashed with Mr Sarkozy over the French bail-out of the engineering giant Alstom, said the change would undermine the Commission’s role as an antitrust watchdog, including taking on multinational giants, including ones based in the US.

The summit could stretch late into tonight with Poland opposing a proposed new EU voting system which it fears will give too much power to Germany.

The proposed deletion of competition – one of the Union’s founding objectives – was smuggled into the draft treaty by the German EU presidency.

In the original constitution, one of the Union’s main objectives was listed as “an internal market where competition is free and undistorted”. France has now persuaded Berlin to put a full stop after the words “internal market” in the new treaty.

Last night Britain appeared unwilling to put up a fight on the issue and German officials downplayed the significance of the move, arguing that the concept appeared 13 times elsewhere in the Union’s legal texts.

But José Manuel Barroso, European Commission president, is concerned by the move.

His aides fear that the European Court of Justice will draw up a “hierarchy of policies” if Brussels is challenged when trying to tackle illegal state aid, cartels or protectionism.

“A creative lawyer could point to the fact that competition was deleted from the constitution as a sign it has been downgraded,” said one aide. “They could also argue that competition is a policy but not an objective,” said one.

By contrast “full employment and social progress” will remain Union objectives, offering possible cover to a country wanting to prop up a failing company or engineer a merger of “national champions”.

Mr Sarkozy will hail the change as proof that the constitution – rejected in a French referendum in 2005 – is dead and that the new version is more “social”.

However French attempts to boost European growth by removing a reference to “price stability” from the Union’s objectives seemed certain to fail. EU diplomats said it was inconceivable that Germany would agree to that request."