Biography • Competition

Steve Spinks, the managing partner of Sidley's Brussels office, has sophisticated EU competition law (cartels, abuse of dominance, merger control, counselling) and trade defense (anti-dumping, anti-subsidy) experience spanning more than 30 years.

Steve's experience in EU cartel investigations goes back many years. It includes, before joining Sidley, three of the cartels in the well known Vitamins case, in which the client he represented avoided fines on statute of limitations grounds in two instances and obtained a substantial leniency reduction in the third. Recent cartel cases at Sidley include LCD panels, cathode ray tubes, optical disk drives, LIBOR and power cables. Steve has also advised on the compatibility of conduct with EU competition rules concerning abuse of dominance, including advice on complex discount schemes.

Steve also has extensive EU merger control experience. Early in his career, he was involved in the appeal that resulted in the landmark Philip Morris judgment establishing the applicability of EU competition law to mergers and acquisitions and paving the way for the adoption of the EU's Merger Regulation in 1989. Prior to joining Sidley, he handled the EU's clearance of longstanding Sidley client AT&T Corp's acquisition of IBM's global communications network.

Steve also has extensive experience counselling clients under antitrust law on a broad variety of agreements and commercial practices including R&D and production joint ventures, sales joint ventures, information exchange systems, other forms of horizontal cooperation, patent, know-how and copyright licensing, exclusive and selective distribution agreements, online distribution, franchising, parallel trade restrictions, other vertical restraints, the ancillary restraints doctrine, unilateral supply constraints and compliance programmes.