
Antitrust
Our expertise
Competition Law holds a major impact for companies and their activities as it raises unavoidable challenges:
- Increased powers of Competition Authorities (investigating power, injunction, precautionary measures…);
- Increasingly severe fine in case of violation;
- The possibility to negotiate solutions or to find alternatives to the regular sanction procedure deal requiring a fine strategical analysis of the issues at stake;
- Simplification and multiplication of private enforcement actions, under the impulse of EU law.
Competition rules, whether it involves cartels or abuse of a dominant position, especially how it articulates with other notions (regulatory, intellectual property…), make the estimation of the potentially anticompetitive nature of the behaviors or practices already used on the involved market by companies, very delicate. Likewise, contentious brought to Competition Authorities are strategical in that they are reputational and because of the financial stakes involved.
Magenta supports companies on the whole range of issues involving Competition Law and assures them a customized support through this list of services:
- Analysis of the lawfulness of some commercial practices used or considered throughout the development of the client’s activities or observed in some rival companies;
- Assistance with competition investigations and contentious, , brought to Competition Authorities and/or European and national jurisdictions;
- Setting up compliance programs, training jurists and commercial teams, carrying out audits and dawn raid simulations.
Our work
State Aid
Issues with State Aids can happen in diverse situations: sectoral emergency plan, implementation of measures to safeguard one or more specific businesses or to finance a service of general economic interest, financing R&D or infrastructure development projects involving public resources, or even through preferential tax arrangements that may be granted to them.
Companies must pay the utmost attention to mechanisms enabling them to benefit, directly or indirectly, from public funds, and to avoid having to return them if they were to constitute illegal state aid.
On the other hand, companies contributing to the funding of these measures, or which are harmed in terms of competition by the system put in place, may have an interest in contesting it (including to obtain reimbursement of the contributions they are obliged to pay).
Magenta’s lawyers possess a perfect knowledge of those rules and assist their clients whenever they wish to assure them the mechanisms they benefit from will not risk being qualified as State Aid, or on the contrary, if they wish to contest the lawfulness of a measure they consider illicit.
Our work
Private enforcement
Magenta is particularly active in the private enforcement field and works alongside its clients, both as plaintiffs as defendants, accompanied by economists, who are experts in this type of litigation.
Our work
