In competition damages actions, the real obstacle is rarely the infringement itself. It is the harm. What loss did the infringement cause? Is that loss causally linked to the unlawful conduct? And can it be translated into numbers that withstand judicial scrutiny?
The harm caused by a cartel does not appear on the invoice. The invoice records the price actually paid. What it does not show is the price that would have prevailed had competition worked. The price of a market without collusion.
That is where economic analysis begins: with the counterfactual. It reconstructs the market that never existed.
Suppose a business paid €100 per unit while, under competitive conditions, it would have paid €92. The damage may be €8 per unit, multiplied by the number of units purchased. But if part of that difference reflects higher raw material costs, transport costs or general inflation, the whole €8 cannot simply be attributed to the cartel. The effect of the infringement must be isolated from everything else that moved prices.
That is an economic exercise, not an accounting one.
This is precisely the issue confronted by the Higher Regional Court of Stuttgart in its judgment of 20 November 2025 in the bathroom fittings cartel. The case concerned a price-fixing arrangement among manufacturers that had previously been sanctioned by the European Commission. The court did not demand a perfect econometric answer where the available data could not support one. Nor did it treat the absence of a flawless regression model as grounds for denying compensation.
Instead, it adopted a structured estimate. Drawing on international meta-studies, it identified a regular corridor of cartel overcharges between 5% and 25%. It then positioned the case within that corridor by reference to the characteristics of the infringement, the findings of the Commission decision and the economic context of the market. The result was an overcharge of 17.5% and an award of approximately €2.9 million plus interest.
The significance lies less in the percentage than in the method. Where precision is impossible, the answer is not to deny compensation. The answer is a reasoned, evidence-based estimate.
That message matters far beyond Germany.
It does not diminish the role of the economic expert. It elevates it. The expert’s task is not arithmetic. It is to reconstruct the invisible market. Which period provides the appropriate competitive benchmark? Which comparable markets, customers or products can serve as reference points? How much of the overcharge reached the claimant? How much was passed on to its own customers?
The standard toolkit — before-and-after comparisons, yardstick markets, comparator products, econometric modelling and pass-on analysis — exists precisely to answer these questions. Stuttgart shows that even where the full toolkit cannot be deployed, economic reasoning still decides the case. The corridor is economics. The meta-studies that anchor it are economics. The assessment of pass-on is economics. The court’s estimate is not a substitute for economic analysis. It is economic analysis applied pragmatically to imperfect evidence.
The same logic extends to umbrella effects. A cartel can raise the general price level of a market, allowing even non-cartelists to charge more. The customer may never have bought from a cartel member, yet still paid a price shaped by the cartel. The Court of Justice recognised this in Kone. Again, everything turns on the counterfactual: was the harm foreseeable, and can it be traced back to the infringement?
And Cyprus?
Directive 2014/104/EU was transposed into Cypriot law in 2017. The right to full compensation for competition law infringements exists here, on paper, as it does elsewhere in the European Union. What barely exists is its exercise.
Businesses that may have overpaid for years — for inputs, services, energy, transport, construction materials or other essential costs — often treat a cartel fine as the end of the story. In reality, the fine is where their own story may begin.
A public fine punishes the infringer. A damages action compensates the victim. The two are not the same.
Stuttgart demonstrates that European courts are increasingly willing to meet claimants halfway: rigorous where the evidence allows, pragmatic where it does not. That is not a relaxation of proof. It is recognition that unlawful coordination often leaves no clean invoice trail. The loss is real, but it must be reconstructed.
The invoice shows what was paid. Economic analysis shows what was lost.
Only the second can found a claim. And increasingly, the real barrier between the victim and compensation is not the absence of a legal right, but the absence of a claim.
This article was prepared by Marina Kouloumbri during her summer 2026 internship at Trojan Economics.
