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Keyword: pharmaceutical

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The search returned 3 results.

Aspen: The European Commission’s First Decision on Excessive Pricing in the Pharmaceuticals Sector journal article

Kalpana Tyagi

European Competition and Regulatory Law Review, Volume 6 (2022), Issue 2, Page 173 - 179

Case AT.40394 Aspen, Commission Decision of 10 February 2021 On 10 February 2021, the Commission entered into a settlement decision with Aspen under Article 9 of Regulation 1/2003. The Commission investigated 'excessive pricing' by the South Africa-headquartered Aspen in six off-patent cancer drugs in the European Economic Area (EEA). These drugs had been off-patent for well over 50 years, and there seemed no rational prima facie justification for their unfairly high prices. This case note offers a critical discussion on the Commission’s case and Aspen’s well-planned strategy to systematically and uniformly increase prices across the Member States.

The Limits of Control: journal article

Competition Law Versus Sector Regulation in the Wake of the European Commission Excessive Pricing Decision in Aspen

Behrang Kianzad

European Competition and Regulatory Law Review, Volume 6 (2022), Issue 3, Page 207 - 221

Despite being heavily regulated, the pharmaceutical sector in Europe has in recent years noted many enforcement decisions against excessive pharmaceutical pricing as an anti-competitive practice under Article 102(a) TFEU. Although described as a ‘rarity’ in competition law in most parts of the doctrine, numerous excessive pricing cases have emerged in Italy, UK, Denmark, and the Netherlands in recent years, but also on the European Commission level. The European competition authority adopted its first excessive pricing commitment decision against a pharmaceutical undertaking (Aspen) in April 2021. Take into account the manifold points of contention in the literature on excessive pricing, concerning the normative issue of preventing supra-competitive pricing on part of dominant undertakings. Add the tension between competition law and sector regulation;, as well as the practical issue of calculating cost, prices and profits for the purpose of finding out the ‘excess’ and ‘unfairness’, and one can see the Aspen case is of particular importance for future cases. Keywords: excessive pricing; Article 102; pharmaceutical pricing; competition law; pricing of medicines; sector regulation, law and economics

Killer Acquisitions and Other Forms of Anticompetitive Collaborations (Part I): journal article

A Case Study on the Pharmaceutical Industry

Björn Lundqvist

European Competition and Regulatory Law Review, Volume 5 (2021), Issue 3, Page 186 - 199

The article aims to address the problem of so-called killer acquisitions broadly, extending also to strategic alliances and other forms of collaborations. We find that ‘killer situations’ can appear in all forms of collaborations that imply a change of control of research results. We therefore conclude in this part I that for the Competition Authority to only focus on killer acquisitions in the form of mergers can be counterproductive. Both mergers and strategic alliances in the pharmaceutical industry would instead benefit from a more intense competition law scrutiny, and in part II we develop what is needed to intensify the competition law scrutiny of accquisitions and collaborations. Keywords: pharmaceutical, mergers, antitrust, killer acquisitions

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