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legal entity, unless the criteria of corporate veil piercing are met. On the other hand, in
EU competition authorities’ perspective, the liability of a subsidiary can be attributed

to its parent company when they constitute a single economic entity, therefore making
them jointly and severally liable. Such contradiction has been argued by academic

scholars that the principle of parental liability, at the current state, is contradicted with
the principle of personal liability and therefore requiresa need to reconsider
the application of the single economic entity in relation to the principle of parental

liability. As a result, it is worth considering how the Commission and the CJEU
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disentangle the tension caused by two opposing principles.

Reasoning of the CJEU

In the renowned Akzo case, The ECJ had a chance to clarify the current question.

The ECJ embarked on the determination by stating that the principle of a single economic
unit is in accordance with the principle of personal liability. The reasons given by the ECJ
were that the liability in EU competition law is imposed to the notion of the undertaking,

therefore according to the principle of personal liability, it is eventually the legal persons
constituting an undertaking who are liable for the antitrust infringements. Later on,
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the ECJ held that in the parent company and its subsidiary relationship, the fact that
the subsidiary is not autonomous, owning to the “economic, organisational and legal
links between them, constitutes a single economic unit – one undertaking – which

enables the Commission to attribute subsidiary liability to the parent company without
the duty to prove the involvement by the parent company.
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It can be observed from the reasoning of the ECJ in the aforementioned paragraph
that the approach of the CJEU in relation to the contradiction between two fundamental
principles in EU law is unclear. The ECJ firstly described that EU competition law

respected the principle of personal liability because the liability is attributed to legal
persons (only that in the EU competition law, it is a peculiar concept of undertaking).

75 Andriani Kalintiri, Revisiting Parental Liability in EU Competition Law, supra (n.25); Simon Burden
and John Townsend, Whose Fault Is It Anyway? Supra, (n.67) p.294; see also fn.7
76 C-97/08 P Akzo Nobel, supra (n.19), para 56-57
77 Ibid, para 58-59

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