A Plea for Plea Bargaining Closing the Gaps Between the EU’s Leniency, Settlement, and Commitments Procedures

Ken Daly, Mar 28, 2013

In laudable efforts to increase its output, the European Commission has developed three tools-leniency, settlements, and commitments-to help it discover infringements of EU competition law, to help it prove those infringements, and to help it bring cases to a speedy conclusion. Although these tools encourage cooperation and do reduce the resources needed to resolve cases, they also lack coherence and to some extent the Commission has needlessly tied its own hands. In some