Claiming damages for anti-competitive agreements: the Competition Appeal Tribunal orders MasterCard to pay £69.3 million to Sainsbury’s supermarkets

Although a ‘stand-alone’ action – rather than a ‘follow-on’ one that relies on a competition authority’s previous finding of anti-competitive conduct – it did refer to certain findings of fact made by the European Commission, in a 2007 decision addressed to MasterCard, which concluded that the intra-EEA MIF set by MasterCard pursuant to the MasterCard Scheme infringed art. 101 TFEU. In 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union dismissed MasterCard’s appeal against the decision and affirmed the Commission’s findings…