These Passing-on Guidelines are meant to provide practical guidance to national courts and stakeholders by reference to the applicable legal context, the relevant economic theory and quantification methods in the specific passing-on context.

The Antitrust Damages Directive helps citizens and companies to get compensation if they are harmed by infringements of EU antitrust rules. This applies not only to direct customers of companies having participated in a cartel, but also to indirect customers and final consumers. These may also suffer harm when direct customers are able to fully or partially pass on a cartel related price increase further down the supply chain.

It is for national courts to decide upon the level of such compensation in such cases. However, determining the amount of overcharges passed on to indirect customers can be particularly difficult. This is why Article 16 of the Damages Directive foresees that the Commission issues non-binding guidelines to help national courts estimate the share of the overcharge passed on to indirect purchasers.

The full text of the Passing-on Guidelines in all EU official languages is available here.

The European Consumer and Competition Day conference was organized jointly by the Competition Council of Romania and the National Authority for Consumer Protection, under the auspices of the Romanian Presidency of the Council of the European Union, at the Palace of Parliament, in Bucharest, on 4 April 2019,.

The conference featured the key note speeches by Ms. Margrethe Vestager, the European Commissioner for Competition and Ms. Věra Jourová, the European Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, who inspired the debates on real convergence towards a non-discriminatory access to resources and benefits across EU. These goals were perceived from a new angle of the digital age, showing how competition policy should promote variety, innovation and quality, in the interest of consumers.  

More than 300 representatives of the European Commission, the national competition authorities, authorities for consumer protection, consumer associations and academic environment attended the conference. The agenda mirrored the priorities of the Romanian Presidency’s work programme, related to competitiveness and connectivity, emphasizing, in particular, relevant topics of debate, such as digital economy from the perspective of competition and consumers, the transposition processes of the Directive ECN Plus and the New CPC Regulation, cartel settlements and policy enforcement across EU.