We have advised this multinational business in the manufacturing industry for several years, including on acquisitions, commercial agreements and intellectual property issues.
In particular, John Spratt and Catherine O’Riordan have advised on and drafted a complex nationwide distribution agreement which has since been adopted by several other European members of the client’s group, and which involved advising on critical competition law issues. This included detailed and careful consideration of the extent to which the client could control the activities of its online dealers and, given its dominant position in the market for certain products, operate a retrospective rebate scheme. There are draconian penalties for breach of competition law (up to 10% of global turnover) so it was clearly very important that, while the agreement needed to reflect our client’s commercial intentions, we alerted the client to the types of arrangement which might fall foul of the relevant legislation, We took the precaution of instructing a leading competition law barrister to review our advice and are pleased to say that he fully endorsed it.
