Facilitating Follow-on Actions? Public and Private Enforcement of EU Competition Law after Directive 2014/104

When the European Commission proposed Directive 2014/104/EU (the Directive), two explicit aims were to optimise the interaction of public and private enforcement as well as ensuring that those who have suffered damages as a result of competition law infringements can receive full compensation. This raises the question of whether the enforcement policy presently pursued by the Commission actually facilitates follow-on actions or whether it instead hampers such actions? This chapter first considers the different tasks allocated to public and private enforcement of competition rules respectively as well as their interaction. Secondly, it analyses how the different decision types that are at the Commission’s disposal (primarily Article 7 decisions and Article 9 decisions) impact private enforcement in so-called follow-on actions. Thirdly, the chapter analyses to what extent damages to private parties could be integrated in public enforcement, particularly within the scope of fines and remedies