Rrequesting confidentiality

Statement of Objections: Possibility to request confidentiality

The undertakings or associations of undertakings should be required to identify any part of an SO adopted by the Commission which in their view contains business secrets (Article 16(3) of Regulation No 773/2004). The Commission may set a time-limit within which the undertakings and associations of undertakings are to: – substantiate their claim for confidentiality with regard to each individual document or part of document, statement or part of statement; – provide the Commission with a non-confidential version of the documents or statements, in which the confidential passages are deleted, 1 – provide a concise description of each piece of deleted information.

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The letter submitting the SO to a party should also remind that any person which makes known its views pursuant to Article 10 (2) of Regulation No 773/2004 or subsequently submits further information to the Commission in the course of the same procedure must clearly identify any material in its reply to the SO, or in any other document it submits, which it considers to be confidential, giving reasons, and provide a separate non-confidential version by the date set by the Commission for making its views known (Article 16(2) of Regulation No 773/2004).

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If undertakings or associations of undertakings fail to comply with the above, the Commission may assume that the documents or statements concerned do not contain confidential information (Article 16(4) of Regulation No 773/2004).

Other Considerations

However, the Commission should be prudent about the use of personal data in the SO (see section 2.2.1 above) and if such data are considered to be essential evidence in (the non-confidential version of) the SO and the (association) of undertakings concerned does not mark them as confidential information such data should as a rule be deleted in the non-confidential version of the SO.

Resources

See Also

References

• Information about Rrequesting confidentiality in the Antitrust Manual of Procedures for the application of Articles 101 and 102 TFEU (Internal DG Competition)

Notes

[Note 1] Article 16(3) (b) of Regulation 773/2004.

Further Reading

• Information about Rrequesting confidentiality in “An Introduction to EU Competition Law”, Moritz Lorenz (Cambridge University Press)