IN DETAIL: COMPETITION LAW
UK’s Competitive Edge, Post-Brexit The UK’s departure from the European Union will impact both EU and UK competition law. UK courts will need to work closely with their EU counterparts to ensure they remain relevant in jurisdictions such as Hong Kong. – By Knut Fournier
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ompetition law around the world is shaping up. In Asia, most countries and territories now enforce sophisticated comprehensive antitrust statutes, to detect and punish anti-competitive agreements, and abuses by monopolies. This includes Hong Kong, whose Competition Ordinance came into force in 2015. In a few weeks, the Competition Tribunal will issue penalties in the first two cases that it completed. In Europe, enforcers are increasingly eager to take on large internet companies, and the French, German and Polish governments have jointly proposed options for modernising EU competition policy. In the UK, a major reform in 2015 spurred an array of antitrust class actions, including against MasterCard and truck manufacturers.
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Against this background, the UK’s departure from the European Union, enacted on 31 January 2020, will impact both EU and UK competition law. The impact of Brexit on UK competition will not be immediate. As part of the effort to convert EU law into UK law at the end of the transition period ending 31 December 2020, the UK government issued regulations to retain EU competition-related regulations and directives which would otherwise cease to have effect at the end of 2020. In the short term, the workload of the UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), the UK antitrust enforcer, will increase: it is expected that the CMA will take on
