Written by Simon Harms
On 14 December 2010, the European Commission(the “Commission“) adopted a new suite of rules governing co-operation between actual or potential competitors, consisting of (i) guidelines on the applicability of EU competition law to horizontal co-operation agreements (the “Guidelines”) and (ii) two new block exemption regulations covering: (1) specialisation and joint production agreements; and (2) research and development agreements (the “R&D BER”).
The Guidelines and block exemption regulations replace existing rules which had been in place for a decade and cover a large number of different types of horizontal co-operation agreements. In an effort to break down the myriad new rules to manageable proportions and in a user-friendly style, GTM has prepared a series of alerts which have examined the rules by types of agreement. This, the final alert in the series, focuses on research and development agreements.1
Continue Reading EU competition: focus on R&D agreements