AGCM

The Authority has been contesting the unlawfulness in antitrust terms of clauses in the cooperative's Articles of Association and Regulations since 2018. Last March, the Regional Administrative Court of Lazio had confirmed the first non-compliance initiated by the AGCM in 2022

The Italian Competition Authority has initiated new investigation proceedings to challenge Radiotaxi 3570 for non-compliance with its decision No. 27244/2018, in which it had found that the clauses contained in the Articles of Association and Regulations of the said Cooperative, as well as in those of Pronto Taxi 6645 and Samarcanda, were unlawful in antitrust terms. These are clauses that prevent members from allocating a share of their production capacity to brokerage platforms competing with the cooperative to provide services for the collection and sorting of taxi demand in the Municipality of Rome.

Unlike Pronto Taxi 6645 and Samarcanda, which removed the exclusivity clauses from their articles, Radiotaxi does not appear to have complied, even after the Regional Administrative Court of Lazio's ruling No. 4769 of 20 March 2023, which confirmed the Authority's decision No. 29969/2022 in its entirety, which established Radiotaxi 3570's initial non-compliance with the 2018 decision. In fact, it merely adopted a measure, consisting of a commercial partnership agreement with the Uber platform, which does not appear adequate to eliminate the infringement since the unlawful non-competition clauses, which were the subject of the warning, continue to be present in the cooperative's Articles of Association and Regulations. The 2018 decision contains an obligation for Radiotaxi 3570 to amend its Articles of Association - by means of an extraordinary shareholders' meeting resolution - in order to remove the full-scope non-competition clauses, which, therefore, in the absence of this intervention, continue to have in themselves an undue effect of influencing the conduct of taxi drivers and unlawful pressure on their negotiating freedom.

Rome, 19 July 2023