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liability, due to its obscurity and imprecision. That is to say, before the presumption
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established by Akzo judgment, the Commission has a burden of proof to establish that

a parent company has the ability to exercise decisive influence, and it practically exerts
such influence. The reference to the decisive influence in this circumstance exhibits

the act of a parent company which is linked to the infringement. Therefore, without
the decisive influence, the liability of a subsidiary cannot be attributed to its parent
company. Complying with this statement, other legal persons in the same economic

entity are not jointly and severally liable for the infringement committed by another
legal person belonging in the same economic entity, since there are no links, i.e. no

decisive influence, between them.
Nonetheless, the practically irrebuttable presumption established in Akzo case

complicates the relationship between the decisive influence and the infringing conducts.
According to the presumption, decisive influence can be described as the influence over
the commercial policy of a subsidiary, by considering all relevant economic,

organisational and legal links between them. The presumption, therefore can be
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interpreted as that, resembling the characteristic of vicarious liability, a parent company
is always presumed to exercise decisive influence over its subsidiary, and as a result,

they indeed constitute a single economic entity. Despite mentioning the decisive influence
as one of the reasons to attribute liability of a subsidiary to its parent company, the lack

of clarity on how exactly a parent company influences the commercial policy, let alone
influence of a parent company over conducts concerning the anti-competitive
infringement of a subsidiary, should render the concept of decisive influence inefficient

to be considered as a suitable criterion to attribute competition liability.

As a final point, the fact that liability in a corporate group is at the moment only
attributed upwards cannot be interpreted as that it is incapable for the CJEU and the
Commission to attribute the liability in other directions. The EU competition authorities

are not bound by any limitations and they have not explicitly expressed that the single
economic entity is to be invoked only in a parent-subsidiary situation. In the same

109 Andriani Kalintiri, Revisiting Parental Liability in EU Competition Law, supra (n.25), p.157
110 C-521/09 P - Elf Aquitaine v Commission, supra (n.44), para 57-58 and case law cited

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