Focus on competition law

Valérie Pironon (photo : D.R.)

Holder of the aggregation (advanced teaching qualification) in private law and professor at the Université de Paris-Sud XI, in this book, Valérie Pironon focuses on the principal areas of progress and legal breaches affecting businesses.

Commerce International: What motivated you to write this book?
Valérie Pironon: “The goal was to sketch out a panorama of applicable rules of competition in terms of the banning of uncompetitive practices, the monitoring of business concentration, and restrictive or tariff practices. The work analyses the coherence of competitiveness laws exposed to a perpetual reform movement. It explains how these rules are applied to internationally-oriented businesses.”
What are some recent interesting evolutions for businesses?
V.P.: “In France, the recent law on State modernisation limited payment deadlines in order to protect SMEs. This represents progress, but what if the business is in importing or exporting? In this case, there is a harmful flip side. The legal limit can hurt French businesses involved in international competition. On a European scale, the Treaty of Lisbon does not bring about a major change, even though the EC Treaty is becoming the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). It stipulates, however, that ‘the Union has the exclusive capacity in (…) the establishment of rules of competition necessary for the functioning of the domestic market’. This text may foreshadow an overall harmonisation of commercial practice laws.”
On what level must the European regulatory system evolve?
V.P.: “Abuses are the subject of a more concrete approach, compared to the past. The sales loss point has gone down, which lessens constraints for big businesses, while small companies are protected by the limit on payment deadlines… These advances are positive. But taking into account the coexistence of domestic law and community law, a permanent movement for reform and uncertainty linked to the application of competition law ‘on an international level’, SMEs are fearful of a lack of legal security. While a clarification of rules is desirable, the first step must be to rework certain texts to make them better understood.”

Droit de la Concurrence
By Valérie Pironon
Gualino Editeur (November 2009),
276 pages, 26 €