The use of soft law instruments is pervasive in the field of EU competition policy. This poses significant legal challenges derived from the progressive ‘hardening’ of these regulatory tools by the European Courts as a result of the application of the general principles of EU law. The...

Procurement activities conducted by the public buyer are very relevant for the proper working of the markets. Hence, the market activities of the public buyer should comply with the requirements of competition law - ie should not restrict or distort competitive outcomes derived from free market...

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...

This paper focuses on the treatment of public procurement activities under EC competition law. After briefly outlining the competition economics of public procurement, the paper shows the perceived shortcomings of current EC competition rules and case-law to effectively tackle publicly-generated...

This chapter aims to identify the key areas where EU competition law is relevant from a public procurement perspective: that is, mainly, the prevention and sanctioning of procurement manipulation by suppliers (bid rigging) and the granting of distortive State aid that advantages some of them...

The interaction between competition law and public procurement has been gaining visibility in recent years. This contribution claims that these two bodies of EU economic law mainly intersect at two points, or in two different dimensions. Firstly, they touch each other at the need to tackle...