EU Judgment in Case C-312/21 Tráficos Manuel Ferrer

Thursday 16th February 2023

Judgment in Case C-312/21 Tráficos Manuel Ferrer

(Competition)

On 11 October 2019, Mr Ignacio and the Spanish company Tráficos Manuel Ferrer, SL (‘the applicants’) brought a civil action for damages against Daimler AG (‘Daimler’ or ‘the defendant’) on the basis of Article 101 TFEU and Article 1902 of the Spanish Civil Code.

The background to that action is the defendant’s infringement of competition law in the form of a concerted practice with other European truck manufacturers in the years 1997 to 2011 (referred to as the ‘truck cartel’), as established in the Commission’s decision of 19 July 2016. (4) Those practices consisted of collusive arrangements intended to fix and increase gross prices for certain types of trucks and to pass on costs for introducing new technologies for preventing polluting emissions.

In support of their action, the applicants state that, for the duration of the cartel, they purchased Mercedes-, Renault- and Iveco-branded trucks which were affected by the conduct of the truck manufacturers penalised by the Commission. The Mercedes- branded truck is manufactured by the defendant in the main proceedings.

The applicants claim that, as a consequence of the defendant’s anticompetitive price- fixing, they suffered harm in the form of surcharges on the vehicles purchased. They submit that this is proven by an expert report which they submitted and which quantifies the harm suffered. The defendant challenged that expert report by way of its own expert report, which stated that the grounds, assumptions and methodology of the applicants’ report are incorrect. The defendant then granted the applicants access to all data taken into consideration in its expert report. The applicants then filed another ‘technical report’ on the results obtained through access to the defendant’s data, but they did not re-draft their own expert report.

Furthermore, an application made by the defendant for the compulsory intervention of Renault Trucks SAS and Iveco SPA (manufacturers of the other trucks purchased by the applicants) in the proceedings was refused by the court on the ground that the statutory conditions were not met, and the conduct of the proceedings continued with Daimler as sole defendant.

Background Documents C-312/21