The European Commission has accepted Aspen's commitments to reduce its prices in Europe for six cancer medicines by 73% on average. These reduced prices will be the maximum that Aspen can charge in the EU and the UK for the coming ten years (The remedy is applicable in the UK because the investigation was started prior to 31 December 2020). Aspen has also committed to the continued supply of these off-patent medicines for the next five years, and to either continue to supply the medicines or authorise other suppliers to market them, in the following five years.
Commitments decisions may offer the Commission a useful alternative to infringement decisions in this complicated area of competition law. As other competition authorities have found, reaching a final infringement decision in excessive pricing cases which survives appeal is difficult.
Although we are still waiting for the final decision adopting the commitments to be published, competition lawyers will be interested to see whether this decision is the first of many such commitments packages agreed between competition authorities and alleged infringers designed to combat excessive pricing.
Read the full article on our competition law blog, The CLIP Board - Aspen pricing commitments accepted by European Commission - an outlier or the 'new normal'?.
Originally published 15.03.2021
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