Cartel and Abuse of Dominance Investigations
Steve’s experience in EU cartel investigations goes back many years. It includes, before joining Sidley, three of the cartels in the well known Vitamins case, in which the client he represented avoided fines on statute of limitations grounds in two instances and obtained a substantial leniency reduction in the third. Recent cartel cases at Sidley include LCD Panels, Cathode Ray Tubes, Optical Disk Drives, LIBOR and Power Cables. In the LCD Panels case, his client received the European Commission’s statement of objections but was not held liable. Steve has also advised on the compatibility of conduct with EU competition rules concerning abuse of dominance, including advice on complex discount schemes. He advised the Association for Competitive Technology, the lead intervener on the side of Microsoft in its appeal against the European Commission’s finding that Microsoft abused a dominant position.
Merger Control
Steve also has extensive EU merger control experience. Early in his career, he was involved in the appeal that resulted in the landmark Philip Morris judgment establishing the applicability of EU competition law to mergers and acquisitions and paving the way for the adoption of the EU’s Merger Regulation in 1989. Prior to joining Sidley, he handled the EU’s clearance of longstanding Sidley client AT&T Corp.’s acquisition of IBM’s global communications network. He has handled a number of clearances based on commitments. His experience also includes one of the few mergers prohibited at the end of an in-depth second phase investigation when the parties did not agree on remedies.
Antitrust Counseling
In addition to his cartel, abuse of dominance and merger control work, Steve has extensive experience counseling clients under antitrust law on a broad variety of agreements and commercial practices including R&D and production joint ventures, sales joint ventures, information exchange systems, other forms of horizontal cooperation, patent, know-how and copyright licensing, exclusive and selective distribution agreements, online distribution, franchising, parallel trade restrictions, other vertical restraints, the ancillary restraints doctrine, unilateral supply constraints and compliance programs.
Trade Defense
Alongside his strong EU competition law experience, Steve has in-depth experience representing exporting producers and petitioners before the European Commission in some 20 EU trade defense cases. Over the past three decades, he has been involved in, among others, cases involving hermetic compressors, color negative paper, video cassette recorders, DRAMs and EPROMs from Japan; microwave ovens, video cassette recorders, compact disk players, small-screen color televisions, video tapes, audio cassettes, DRAMs, large televisions and side-by-side refrigerators from Korea; and coated fine paper and solar panels from China.