Competition: Judgement on abuse of dominant position in AstraZeneca case
In case T-321/05 the General Court of the European Union confirmed on 01.07.10 the decision of the Commission which found that AstraZeneca abused its dominant market position by preventing the marketing of generic products replicating their medicinal product Losec. The Court considers that AstraZeneca made misleading representations to the national patent offices. Furthermore, the Court states that the fact that pharmaceutical companies can deregistrate their marketing authorisation does not cause such conduct to escape the prohibition laid down in Article 82 EC (Art. 102 TFEU). However, the Commission failed to prove that the deregistration of the marketing authorisation was capable of having an impact on parallel imports. Because of that, the Court reduced the fine from € 60 Mio. to € 52.5 Mio.
