Philips & Infineon Technologies (C-98/17 & C-99/17): The Court of Justice Reminds the General Court of the Need to Exercise Full Jurisdiction over Commission Fines

October 2018

CPI EU News Column edited by Thibault Schrepel, Sam Sadden & Jan Roth (CPI) presents:

Philips & Infineon Technologies (C-98/17 & C-99/17): The Court of Justice Reminds the General Court of the Need to Exercise Full Jurisdiction over Commission Fines By Sandra Marco Colino (Chinese University of Hong Kong)¹

Introduction: The Smart Card Chips Cartel, or Collusion through Bilateral Contacts

The Philips-Infineon court saga before the European Courts is not over, at least not for Infineon. On September 26 2018, the Court of Justice (“CJ”) set aside a 2016 judgment of the General Court (“GC”) which had dismissed the company’s appeal against the fine levied on it by the European Commission (“EC”) in 2014 for taking part in the Smart Card Chips Cartel.² The EC’s investigation revealed that, through bilateral contacts, competitors Philips, Infineon, Samsung, and Renesas had exchanged sensitive information relating to inter alia price, customers, and production capacity. The practices were considered to amount to a single and continuous infringement since, according to the EC, there were “objective grounds to assume the single anti-competitive aim of the participants in the collusive contacts and their common pattern of behavior.”³ The fines totaled €138 million, and Infineon was hit the hardest with a penalty of almost €83 million. Under the Leniency Notice,⁴ Renesas obtained full immunity, while Samsung’s punishment was reduced by