Some Spanish regions have recently established a new tax on large commercial malls placed in their territory. This tax can be questioned on several grounds, both legal and economic. This paper examines whether according to EU State aid law the new tax can be deemed an illegal State aid to small...

The implementation of the EU Services Directive (2006/123/CE) should entail a boost of freedom of enterprise and free competition in the services sector in Spain. Although a proper interpretation of both these constitutional principles should have already led to the elimination of many barriers...

Block exemption regulations (BER) survived the modernisation of EC competition law. According to the European Commission and some commentators, BER have a major role to play in the system instituted by Regulation 1/2003. Others are more critical and consider that BER are hard to nest within the...

Tort Law is not harmonised at a European level. Substantive and procedural regulations vary substantially across EU Member States in most of the facets and dimensions of damages actions. These differences derive, amongst other causes, from different legal traditions. However, significant efforts...

The new EU initiative on collective redress reflects an evolution European Commission's position on private antitrust enforcement. The current approach of the Commission has more modest goals than those set by the White Paper (2008) and the Draft proposal of Directive Directive on rules...

The enforcement of antitrust laws in Spain has mainly been a task for public authorities. Sanctions for antitrust infringements can only be pecuniary, as prison or other criminal penalties are not used as a punishment device. Public enforcement of antitrust laws has, therefore, taken the form of...

When the 1978 Constitution opted for a market economy system as the principal mechanism for distributing goods and services it included other relevant declarations which seemed to imply that the Spanish market was to be a single one.The principle of a single market is a Constitutional Court...

This paper makes an original contribution to the literature on the developing area of private enforcement of EU competition law. It delivers a significant, rigorous and comprehensive analysis of the transposition across a broad selection of Member States (MS) of a major EU Directive introduced...

This paper analyzes the evolution of Competition law and policy in the recent new Member States of the European Union. Institutions and rules were established in these countries throughout the nineties and there is already some experience about their enforcement, with relevant implications for...

This article analyzes the features of debt and late payment registries as an instrument of information exchange among companies from the perspective of antitrust laws. Since 1992 the Spanish Competition Tribunal has issued more than 300 resolutions dealing with the business agreements to share...