Antitrust Law Blog

British Airways PLC and Korean Air Lines Co, Ltd. will each pay $300 million fines and plead guilty to charges that they participated in conspiracies to fix prices of passenger and cargo flights, according to the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division.  United States v. British Airways PLC, 07-183-JDB (D.D.C. filed Aug. 1, 2007); United States v. Korean Air Lines Co., Ltd., 07-184-JDB (D.D.C. filed Aug. 1, 2007).

On February 21, 2007, Whole Foods and Wild Oats and entered into an agreement under which Whole Foods would acquire Wild Oats for a price of approximately $670 million.  On June 6, 2007, the FTC filed a Complaint in the United States District Court for the District of Columbia seeking to block this transaction.  According to the FTC, the proposed Whole Foods/Wild Oats transaction would constitute an anticompetitive merger of the top two competitors in the highly concentrated market for "premium natural and organic supermarkets."

On July 27, the European Commission (EC) confirmed that it sent a Statement of Objections (SO) to Intel alleging that Intel infringed European competition rules on the abuse of a dominant position (Article 82) with the aim of excluding its main rival, AMD, from the x86 Computer Processing Units (CPU) market.  In the SO, the EC alleges that Intel engaged in three types of abuse of a dominant market position.  First, Intel allegedly provided substantial rebates to various Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) conditional on them obtaining all or the great majority of their CPU requirements from Intel.  Secondly, Intel allegedly made payments in order to induce an OEM to either delay or cancel the launch of a product line incorporating an AMD-based CPU.  Third, in the context of bids against AMD-based products for strategic customers in the server segment of the market, Intel allegedly offered CPUs on average below cost.  The EC alleges that these three types of conduct were aimed at excluding AMD, Intel's main rival, from the market, and each exclusionary practice  reinforced the other as part of a single, overall anti-competitive strategy.  Intel has 10 weeks to reply to the SO, and will then have the right to be heard in an Oral Hearing.

A class action antitrust Complaint passed the new, stricter "plausibility" pleading standard the Supreme Court established earlier this summer in Bell Atlantic Corp. v. Twombly, 127 S.Ct. 1955; (No. 05-1126) 2007 U.S. LEXIS 5901 (2007).  In re Hypodermic Products Antitrust Litigation, No. 05-CV-1602 (JLL/CCC) (D. N.J. June 29, 2007).  In three separate, unpublished opinions, a New Jersey district court overruled defendant medical device manufacturer Becton Dickinson & Company (Becton)'s motion to dismiss Section 1, Sherman Act and Section 3, Clayton Act claims because the three Complaints provided plausible grounds to infer that Becton and group purchasing organizations (GPOs) entered into unreasonably anticompetitive agreements.