It's the Ordinary Court and not the specialized section on business matters to be able to decide on competitive issues related to the‘'abuse of economic dependence of one company towards another.
And it is always the ordinary Court that has to decide on issues related to pure unfair competition.
It has been established by Court of Cassation with an ordinance at the end of February 2018.
According to the Supreme Court, the functional criterion for dividing jurisdiction between sections of the same Tribunal must be identified in the specific case brought to the Tribunal's attention.
The competence of the specialized sections on business matters, pursuant to art. 3 of Legislative Decree no. 168 of 2003, as amended by art. 2 of Legislative Decree no. 1 of 2012 (converted, with amendments, by Law no. 27 of 2012), must be excluded, in favor of that of the ordinary section, in the case of a request for compensation for diversion of customers attributable to so-called pure unfair competition where no interference, even indirect, with the exercise of industrial property rights or copyright can be identified, that is, when the ascertainment of the violation of the right to fair competition does not imply an incidental assessment of the violation of proprietary rights, as a constituent element of the unlawful act.
Likewise, the jurisdiction of the said specialized section does not apply where the compensation request be proposed on the basis of or in connection with a hypothesis of abuse of economic dependence of one company on another, pursuant to art. 9 of Law no. 192 of 1998, since this is a purely contractual hypothesis that is outside the scope of the concept of abuse of a dominant position, pursuant to art. 3 of Law no. 287 of 1990, and is therefore irrelevant to the protection of competition and the market. .
In the case at hand, the Court of Cassation found that the claim was based on the violation of contractual obligations that were not connected, even indirectly, to proprietary rights, which were not invoked by any of the parties involved.
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