A report on the Automotive News web site (which I can't link to as it is subscriber-only) says that the Commission is planning to extend the block exemption. No great surprise, as they have done it with previous iterations of teh exemption, and time was already getting short before the world caved in on itself last year. The Commissioner has already hinted that this would be on the cards, too.
The intelligence comes from Christoph Konrad MEP, and the report tells us that a temporary extension is referred to as "the Konrad option". I thought Malcolm Harbour had been pressing for it, too ... Consultation with the European parliament will already push the new exemption back to about 2012, it is suggested, and the Commission is planning to present its proposal in July - which neatly takes it into the lifetime of the next Parliament, which will be elected in June.
The possible new regulation could be in the form of a general umbrella block exemption with sector specific guidelines, for the motor industry and presumably also for others. The other possibility is for a "streamlined" version of the present block exemption, with dealer protection provisions excised and (at best, for dealers) placed in guidelines. Again, nothing very new there: these seem to be the same possibilities that were being mooted in February, but I suppose that the more often they are repeated, the more credence we can give them.
The intelligence comes from Christoph Konrad MEP, and the report tells us that a temporary extension is referred to as "the Konrad option". I thought Malcolm Harbour had been pressing for it, too ... Consultation with the European parliament will already push the new exemption back to about 2012, it is suggested, and the Commission is planning to present its proposal in July - which neatly takes it into the lifetime of the next Parliament, which will be elected in June.
The possible new regulation could be in the form of a general umbrella block exemption with sector specific guidelines, for the motor industry and presumably also for others. The other possibility is for a "streamlined" version of the present block exemption, with dealer protection provisions excised and (at best, for dealers) placed in guidelines. Again, nothing very new there: these seem to be the same possibilities that were being mooted in February, but I suppose that the more often they are repeated, the more credence we can give them.
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