The Plenary Session of the Competition Committee unanimously decided during its meeting on 22/07/2022 to accept the relevant Dispute Settlement Proposals submitted by the companies 1) PANTELIS PAPADOPOULOS SA, 2) STANLEY BLACK & DECKER (GREECE) TRADE OF TOOLS AND MACHINERY LTD, 3) SPYRIDON PAPATHEODOSIOU S.A.E.V.E and 4) MAKITA HELLAS – TRADE OF ELECTRICAL TOOLS S.A., following the Settlement Statements on behalf of the above parties.
For the purposes of the investigation, the General Directorate of Competition carried out, within the framework of its responsibilities, an on-site inspection on 24.06.2021, at the headquarters of, among others, the above companies and it was deemed appropriate to send questionnaires to the companies in question.
The relevant market of products or services includes all products or services considered by the consumer to be interchangeable or substitutable for each other, due to their characteristics, their price and their intended use. In the present case, the companies involved are active in the import and trading markets of a) motorized hand tools and b) garden tools.
The relevant geographic market includes the area in which the undertakings concerned sell the relevant products under sufficiently homogeneous conditions of competition. In this case, the relevant geographical area can be defined firstly as the whole of the Greek territory, as the companies involved are active or may be active throughout the territory.
The parties involved in the case expressed in writing their interest in investigating the possibility of their inclusion in the DTT and filed a relevant request, in accordance with what is provided in par. 16 of no. 704/2020 of EA Decision. Following these requests, the EA at its meeting on 21.03.2022 unanimously decided that this case is suitable and can be included in the said settlement procedure, as it meets the criteria for being included in it (No. 704/2020 Decision EA, par. 6, 9 and 31). To this end, in the context of exercising its discretion to submit cases to a settlement process, the EA took into account, in particular, the sincere intention of the parties concerned to submit to the dispute settlement process, the number of companies requesting to be submitted to a settlement process[2], the nature of the infringement in question as a vertical collusion and the expected degree of procedural efficiency, which was judged to be significantly high in this case. The Rapporteur then invited the parties involved to bilateral meetings and when a sufficient degree of consensus was reached regarding the facts, their legal characterization, the gravity and duration of the violations, the degree of proof of the objections based on the evidence and the calculation of the range of the fine, the involved parties responded to the Rapporteur’s invitation to submit a “Dispute Settlement Proposal” and these were submitted by them, in accordance with par. 27 of no. 704/2020 of EA Decision. The parties involved filed the settlement declarations between July 12 and 15, 2022, pursuant to par. 37 of no. 704/2020 of EA Decision, according to which, they irrevocably, unconditionally and clearly confirm that the Reporter’s Settlement Report echoes and reflects the submitted Settlement Proposals and, therefore, their commitment to submit to the Dispute Settlement Process is valid.
The companies involved engaged in resale price fixing practices (“RPM”), which were largely complied with by the participating retailers. Especially with regard to one company, it was additionally established that a contractual clause prohibiting parallel imports was imposed in contracts with the network of authorized resellers. Therefore, the examined practices and contractual terms fall under the concept of “agreement”, namely the concept of a vertical agreement between companies operating at a different level in the distribution chain and fall within the scope of articles 1 par. 1 of Law 3959/ 2011 and 101 par. 1 of the TFEU. The above practices are capable of significantly affecting intra-Community trade, within the meaning of EU competition rules and, therefore, Article 101 TFEU is parallelly applied in the present case. At the same time, the conditions are met (in particular identification of object, products, participating parties, geographical area and applied methods) for the characterization of the examined practices as a single and continuous violation, while no individual exemption is understood based on articles 1 par. 3 of Law 3959/ 2011 and 101 par. 3 of the TFEU, based on the rationale of the Report.
The Plenary of the EA, by virtue of par. 35 of no. 704/2020 of its Decision, decided to accept, in accordance with the reasoning of the Reporter’s Report, the above-mentioned Dispute Settlement Proposals submitted by the above companies and to issue a decision by which:
It finds that the parties involved violated Article 1 of Law 3959/2011 and 101 of the TFEU due to their participation in prohibited vertical partnerships by virtue of the practices that are briefly, in the context of the Dispute Settlement Procedure, described in the Report. The participation for each of the involved parties in the prohibited vertical arrangements is as follows:
PANTELIS PAPADOPOULOS SA: the duration of the violation begins on 24.02.2015 and ends on 05.02.2021
STANLEY BLACK & DECKER (GREECE) TRADE OF TOOLS AND MACHINERY LTD: the duration of the infringement starts on 16.09.2019 and ends on 22.03.2021
SPYRIDON PAPATHEODOSIOU SA: the duration of the violation begins on 05.06.2016 and ends on 02.05.2021
MAKITA HELLAS – ELECTRICAL TOOLS TRADE S.A.: the duration of the resale price determination violation starts on 17.10.2019 to 30.03.2021 and the duration of the violation of the prohibition of parallel imports starts on 15.05.2012 to 11.04.2022.
It imposes the following fines per company for the fulfillment of the violations found in the Report of Articles 1 of Law 3959/2011 and 101 of the TFEU:
PANTELIS PAPADOPOULOS SA: the total fine amounts to 710,964 euros
STANLEY BLACK & DECKER (GREECE) TRADE OF TOOLS AND MACHINERY LTD: the total fine amounts to 255,699 euros
SPYRIDON PAPATHEODOSIOU SA: the total fine amounts to 63,838 euros
MAKITA HELLAS – ELECTRICAL TOOLS TRADE S.A.: the total fine for the two (2) violations amounts to 342,806 euros.
It obliges the parties involved to cease, if they have not already done so, and to omit in the future the violations of Articles 1 of Law 3959/2011 and 101 of the TFEU found in the Report.
The total fine of the four (4) participants in the Settlement of parties amounts to 1,373,307 euros.
It is noted that this is the first Decision of the EA concerning a Dispute Settlement case where the alleged violations concern articles 1 of Law 3959/2011 and/or 101 of the TFEU in the context of vertical agreements, following the publication of Law 4886/2022 ( Gazette A’ 12/24.12.2022).
Source: Capital
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