Perspectives on
antitrust enforcement.

Twenty years ago, if you were a company that fell victim to a cartel in Europe, you basically had no realistic way to get your money back. You knew you had a right to sue in theory — the EU's top court had said so as early as 2001 — but in practice the obstacles were enormous: you had no access to the cartelists' documents, no way to prove the overcharge, no procedure to join forces with other victims, and faced being crushed by defendants' legal resources. Today, that picture has changed dramatically.

The transformation has been driven by four big forces. First, the EU courts themselves — through a string of landmark rulings from Courage and Crehan (2001) through to Sumal and Volvo/DAF (2021–22) — progressively expanded who could sue, what they could recover, and what evidence they could access. Second, the 2014 Antitrust Damages Directive harmonised the rules across all Member States, introducing a presumption of harm in cartel cases, disclosure obligations, and a workable five-year limitation period.

Third, a cottage industry of specialist players emerged to make enforcement actually happen: claims aggregators like CDC Cartel Damage Claims — founded in 2002 and the inventor of the "bundling model" — built the infrastructure to collect, package, and litigate thousands of individual claims as a single action. And fourth, professional litigation funding provided the capital to make large-scale enforcement economically viable.

The Big Landmark Cases

The big landmark cartels — Trucks (the largest private enforcement saga in EU history, generating tens of thousands of claims across Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy, and Austria), Air Cargo, Hydrogen Peroxide, and Mastercard Interchange Fees — have been the litigation battlegrounds on which this system was stress-tested. The Trucks cartel alone has produced a cascade of CJEU preliminary rulings, national Supreme Court judgments in Spain and Germany, and hundreds of millions in settlements, with litigation still actively ongoing.

Real Gaps Remain

There are still real gaps. Continental Europe largely lacks a workable class action for consumer-level antitrust harm — the 2020 Representative Actions Directive deliberately excluded competition cases from its scope — leaving the UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal as the only European forum with a genuine opt-out collective proceedings regime.

On the continent, the claims bundling model — victims assigning their rights to a specialist aggregator who sues in its own name — is doing much of the heavy lifting that a class action would do elsewhere, though it continues to face legal challenges from defendants trying to knock out assignments on technical grounds.

The Road Ahead

Looking ahead, the next frontier is Article 102 (abuse of dominance) damages cases, particularly against Big Tech following Digital Markets Act enforcement. These are structurally harder to litigate than cartel follow-on claims, and the legal and economic toolkit is less developed. Regulatory pressure on litigation funders is also building at the EU level, which could reshape the economics of funded antitrust cases.

But the overall direction of travel is clear: private antitrust enforcement in Europe has gone from a theoretical right to a functioning — if still uneven — industry.