The Liability of Corporate Groups for Violation of EU Competition Law

The corporate group indicates the union of several companies, legally separated but economically linked to each other, in order to achieve a common interest. Considering this general framework, this contribution deals namely with the liability of corporate groups for violation of EU competition law. The EU competition law under Arts. 101 and 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union is applicable to “undertakings”, whose notion is not defined under the European Treaties and its delimitation, due to the European Court of Justice’s case law elaboration, makes it an autonomous notion of EU law which must be interpreted in functional terms. Therefore, in the event of violation of EU competition law, doubts may arise as to which is the legal entity liable within the corporate group. In the public enforcement of EU competition law, the single economic unit's doctrine is applied, imposing fines on the parent company for the anticompetitive practices of a subsidiary in cases decisive influence over the subsidiary’s commercial policy is exercised. In this perspective, this contribution aims to raise problems arising out of the same legal reasoning applied in the private enforcement of EU competition law, where the EU law instances of full effectiveness of competition law rules and the domestic private law’s instances of personal responsibility collide. In the wake of the hybridization of remedies, it is up to EU law to provide, firstly and where possibly entirely, an interpretative solution to this issue, which ends up confirming the jointly and severally liability of all the single economic unit’s companies.