Take a deep breath, and read on.
(The following is an actual transcript from a press briefing made today at the European Commission)
Asked today if European competition rules or new legislation would be used to break up over-powerful energy firms, EU competition commissioner Neelie Kroes replied:
“Both are arguments that where you are touching upon that are taking into account so antitrust is just a way of dealing with not the right competition rules, with the competition rules not in the right way, so if there is a situation talking about not an unbundled situation and we saw it all over Europe, for the inquiry was not only in a couple of member states but all member states were involved in this inquiry, and we saw incumbents, and they’re also human beings at the end of the day in the management teams, they are absolutely more focussed on their own positions than opening markets and giving another one a newcomer a chance to be active in that market. If that is the case, if there is not that much of cross border activity in this case, then when we are talking about one single european energy market we are far from where we want to be and if that is the case then we have to check and I can assure you with our infringements and that is one of the role of the commissioner for competition policy, the enforcer of taking into account that we do have competition law and that we have the regulation though if they are not behaving, and some are not, we are aware of that after the inquiry and therefore the infringements were taken into action then it is indeed article 82 it is also in some cases article 86 it is indeed the whole range of what we have to check as being in line with fair competition.”
Glad that’s clear then …
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