The European Union is investigating whether drug companies Novartis and Johnson & Johnson colluded to keep a generic painkiller out of the Dutch market, the bloc's antitrust watchdog said Friday.

Microsoft is set to get the approval from Brussels for the acquisition of the online phone service Skype.

Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, and several of its main European customers have been raided by competition authorities at the start of a flagship Brussels investigation into suspected market abuse.

The European Commission has opened an antitrust investigation into the standardization process for payments over the internet (e-payments) undertaken by the European Payments Council (EPC).

Speech by Joaquín Almunia Vice President of the European Commission responsible for Competition Policy in European Parliament.

EU Commission has issued an updated statistics report on cartels containing some important data..

Stricter European Union rules controlling state aid for banks will be delayed beyond the end of this year, extending the exemptions given to governments seeking to rescue stricken financial groups.

Three years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the tensions in the financial markets remind us those we saw at the beginning of the crisis:

The European Commission welcomes the judgments by the General Court (Cases T-12/06 Deltafina and T-25/06 Alliance One) which uphold a decision of 2005 fining Italian tobacco processors (including Deltafina and Alliance One and its subsidiaries) for operating a buying cartel in the Italian raw tobacco market (see IP/05/1315).

The European Union wants to open vertically-integrated exchanges to competition and introduce tougher regulation of high-frequency trading firms as part of a wide range of reforms aimed at shaking up trading in Europe.