The Romanian Antitrust Litigation Legal Framework

The primary legal framework governing antitrust infringements in Romania is Competition Law No 21/1996. Under this law, the Romanian Competition Council investigates and sanctions infringements of both the domestic competition rules and Articles 101 and 102 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). Law No 21/1996 also forms the basis for challenging the Competition Council’s decisions before the courts under the public antitrust litigation regime.

Private antitrust litigation in Romania is governed by a combination of EU and national law. The core substantive and procedural framework for private damages actions derives from Directive 2014/104/EU (the “Damages Directive”), which was first transposed into Romanian law by Government Emergency Ordinance No 39/2017 (“GEO 39/2017”). After GEO 39/2017 was declared unconstitutional on procedural grounds in 2020, Government Emergency Ordinance No 170/2020 (“GEO 170/2020”) replaced it and remains the primary source of law for competition damages claims. GEO 170/2020 includes a rebuttable presumption that cartels cause harm equal to 20% of the value of the affected products or services. Otherwise, GEO 170/2020 is virtually a verbatim adoption of the Damages Directive. This special regime operates as lex specialis alongside the general tort liability rules of the Civil Code and the general rules of civil procedure under the Civil Procedure Code.

Furthermore, Competition Law 21/1996 also provides for the right to compensation following an antitrust infringement. In addition to GEO 170/2020, the Competition Law also allows consumer associations to bring damages claims on behalf of consumers, as well as professional or business associations to pursue such claims for their members.

Private damages claims also frequently include requests for damages under the substantive rules governing unfair competition, under Law No 11/1991 on combating unfair competition. Although this framework sits outside the strict antitrust domain of Articles 101 and 102 TFEU, conduct such as the abuse of a superior bargaining position may nonetheless be relevant to practitioners in this area. The Competition Council also ensures public enforcement of rules against the abuse of a superior bargaining position. Furthermore, disputes are currently pending in which claimants seek damages for such infringements, as alternative claims to requests for damages for abuse of dominance. While the private antitrust damages framework under GEO 170/2020 does not extend to this category of claims, Law No 11/1991 provides, in broadly similar terms, that decisions of the Romanian Competition Council finding infringements of the unfair competition rules carry evidentiary weight before the civil courts hearing the related damages claims.

The Romanian framework is complemented by Government Emergency Ordinance No 25/2019, which protects trade secrets and confidential business information disclosed during litigation and by Law No 414/2023, which transposes the EU Representative Actions Directive for consumer protection matters but does not extend to competition law claims.

Together, these instruments form a still developing but increasingly structured private enforcement ecosystem, in which the substantive rules are largely harmonised with the rest of the EU, but procedural practice remains shaped by a relatively limited body of case law.

Private Antitrust Litigation Cases in Romania

In recent years, the Romanian jurisdiction has seen an increase in private antitrust litigation, particularly private damages claims, especially following the transposition of the Damages Directive.

The bulk of reported case law to date consists of follow-on claims arising out of the European Commission’s Trucks Cartel decision (Case AT.39824), as well as follow-on and stand-alone private damages in abuse of dominance cases. There are also cases related to the pilotage market investigation conducted by the Competition Council.

Romanian courts have awarded substantial damages in follow-on claims for abuse of dominance, most notably against telecommunications operators, including an award of over EUR10.2 million against one operator for abusive conduct in the telecommunications market.

Most recently, in 2026, the Competition Council opened an investigation into an alleged information exchange between several banks concerning the fixing of a benchmark interbank interest rate used to price retail and corporate lending; as of the end of July 2026, once finalised, this decision is expected to generate a significant new wave of follow-on damages claims and claims for annulment of related interest-rate clauses.

Recent Legislative Proposals

On the legislative front, as of the end of July 2026, two proposals are currently pending before the Romanian Parliament that would materially affect the private enforcement landscape.

One proposal would introduce a mandatory compensation mechanism requiring credit institutions to correct pricing mistakes identified by the competition and consumer protection authorities and reimburse affected consumers directly, without litigation. This proposal has so far received a mixed response from Romania’s advisory bodies.

The second would amend GEO 170/2020 to expressly grant the Ministry of Finance standing to claim damages suffered by public authorities and to make it easier for natural persons to bring joint claims, although it stops short of introducing a genuine class action mechanism. This proposal has also received mixed responses from advisory bodies.

Statutory Basis for Damages Claims

Private antitrust damages claims in Romania are brought either as follow-on actions, which rely on an infringement decision issued by the Competition Council or the European Commission or as stand-alone actions, in which the claimant must itself establish the existence of the infringement before the civil court.

The principal statutory basis for such claims is GEO 170/2020, which transposes the Damages Directive and applies as lex specialis to the general tort liability rules of the Civil Code. For further details, see 1.1 Current Framework for Private Antitrust Litigation.

Prior to the transposition of the Damages Directive, claims for damages were based on the Romanian Competition Law No 21/1996, which provided for the right of natural and legal persons harmed by an antitrust infringement to bring damages claims within two years following the date on which the Competition Council’s decision became final. Such claims were generally based on Competition Law 21/1996 and general Romanian rules on tort liability.

Private enforcement was used in a range of antitrust infringements, ranging from abuse of dominance to cartels or exchange of information.

Statutory Basis for Other Private Enforcement Claims

Beyond compensatory damages claims, claimants may also seek the annulment of contracts or individual clauses said to implement or reflect an anticompetitive agreement, relying on the automatic nullity of prohibited agreements under Article 101(2) TFEU and Article 52(1) of Competition Law No 21/1996, typically coupled with a restitution claim, as well as claims framed under unfair commercial practices or unfair contract terms legislation.

Hybrid Claims

In addition to compensatory damages and annulment claims, Romanian claimants may in principle advance so-called hybrid claims, combining a follow-on damages claim covering the period addressed by a final infringement decision with a stand-alone head of claim covering harm allegedly suffered outside that decision’s temporal or material scope, for instance for conduct predating the start of the sanctioned infringement.

For example, in an investigation conducted in the maritime sector, the Competition Council found an infringement relating to towage services and, because the relevant market was considered similar to the pilotage services market, a private damages action has been brought in relation to the pilotage services market, illustrating how a finding in one closely related market can support a claim in an adjacent, unsanctioned market.

Contractual claims may also be available where the parties have a direct contractual relationship, although Romanian law generally does not allow a claimant to choose freely between contractual and tortious remedies where the alleged harm arises from a contract, so that a claimant is usually confined to the private damages framework rather than being able to plead the two bases cumulatively. In addition, objections may be raised against enforcing contractual obligations if antitrust conduct affects them.

Courts’ Jurisdiction in Private Antitrust

Private antitrust damages actions brought under GEO 170/2020 fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Bucharest Tribunal as the first-instance court, regardless of the parties’ domicile or where the harm occurred. A first-instance ruling is subject to appeal before the Bucharest Court of Appeal, which may review both the facts and the law and a further appeal limited to points of law lies to the High Court of Cassation and Justice.

Claims that fall outside the scope of GEO 170/2020 are not subject to this exclusive jurisdiction and may be brought before any otherwise competent Romanian court or a member state court. Examples include claims submitted to the courts before the adoption of GEO 170/2020 or the prior GEO 39/2017, claims brought in the period between the two laws or private enforcement claims for remedies other than damages (ie, annulment claims).

The exclusive jurisdiction is similar to that applicable in public antitrust enforcement litigation, where actions seeking the annulment of decisions issued by the Romanian Competition Council fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Bucharest Court of Appeal, with appeals heard by the High Court of Cassation and Justice.

Allocation Within Courts

In practice, competition damages claims brought before the Bucharest Tribunal have generally been allocated to specialised civil divisions with experience in commercial disputes. This concentration of expertise within a single first-instance court is intended to promote consistency in the application of GEO 170/2020’s presumptions and disclosure rules, although the relatively small number of cases decided on the merits to date means that a fully settled body of first-instance practice has not yet emerged.

Claims that fall outside the specific scope of GEO 170/2020, such as general tort claims relating to competition-adjacent conduct or claims framed exclusively under consumer protection legislation, are allocated according to the ordinary rules of civil jurisdiction and may accordingly be heard by any competent court in Romania, including courts outside Bucharest where the defendant or the harm is located elsewhere.

A final decision of the Competition Council constitutes irrefutable proof before the civil courts of the existence and nature of the infringement, as well as of its material, personal, temporal and territorial scope, so that a claimant relying on a final decision does not need to re-litigate liability.

Before a decision becomes final, it nonetheless benefits, as an administrative act, from presumptions of legality, truthfulness and authenticity, although these presumptions may be inapplicable if the decision is suspended pending an annulment challenge. In such cases, the civil court should itself examine whether an infringement occurred.

The Competition Council does not sit in the civil proceedings, but courts may request its assistance in quantifying damages where the Competition Council considers this appropriate.

Consistent with the general Damages Directive framework, decisions of competition authorities of other EU member states may be relied upon as evidence of an infringement, without carrying the same irrefutable evidentiary status as a final Romanian decision.

Foreign NCA decisions have not yet featured prominently in reported Romanian case law, but consistent with the Damages Directive framework, a final decision of a competition authority in another EU member state should, at a minimum, constitute prima facie evidence that an infringement occurred, which a Romanian court is entitled to weigh alongside other evidence even though it would not carry the same irrefutable status as a final Romanian Competition Council.

When the underlying decision comes from the European Commission, Romanian courts have treated it in the same way as domestic decisions for these purposes, as both are governed by the EU law framework that gives them binding effect on national courts. Romanian Courts have also relied on Article 16 of Regulation 1/2003, which prohibits national courts from ruling contrary to a decision adopted by the European Commission. Therefore, even when claims fell outside of the scope of the national rules transposing the Damages Directive, Romanian courts have been seen to respect the effects of a European Commission decision.

In principle, in private damages litigation, the claimant bears the general burden of proof and must prove that the conditions of civil liability are met and that the damages claimed meet the necessary standard of remedy, including reasonableness and causal link.

If the claim is covered by the Damages Directive transposition, several statutory presumptions ease the burden of proof on the part of a claimant in a follow-on claim.

First, GEO 170/2020 provides for the statutory presumption that cartels cause harm, in the amount of a 20% overcharge in prices for the goods and/or services covered by the cartel. The prior GEO 39/2017 (ie, the initial transposition) only provided for a presumption of harm. GEO 170/2020 also provides that abuse of dominance infringements are presumed to cause harm. These presumptions are relative.

Even where these presumptions apply, the claimant must still establish a causal link between the infringement and its own specific loss and in practice both parties tend to rely heavily on expert evidence to establish or contest quantum.

Second, a final decision by the competition authorities creates an irrefutable presumption of infringement. As noted in 2.3 Impact of Competition Authorities, a non-final decision may still carry strong evidentiary weight as an administrative deed under general procedural rules.

However, in stand-alone cases, the claimant must bring forward evidence of the infringement.

When presumptions apply, the burden to overturn them lies with the other party.

The pass-on defence is available to defendants in Romanian follow-on and stand-alone claims, allowing a defendant to argue that the direct purchaser suffered no loss or a reduced loss, because it passed all or part of the overcharge on to its own customers. The burden of proving that the overcharge was passed on rests with the defendant, who may seek disclosure of evidence from the claimant or from third parties to support this defence.

The defence has been pleaded in several Romanian Trucks Cartel cases. The defendants argued that the claimant, as an indirect purchaser, bore the burden of proving that it had not passed the alleged overcharge downstream to its own customers, whether through its resale prices or through a buy-back mechanism and that a professional operator could reasonably be expected to have incorporated any overcharge into its pricing. However, both claims were initially dismissed as inadmissible following the unconstitutionality of GEO 39/2017, before being sent for retrial on appeal on the basis that the underlying tort action survived independently of that ordinance, meaning the substantive pass-on arguments raised by the defendants have not yet been tested by a Romanian court on their merits.

Claims for antitrust damages under GEO 170/2020 are subject to a five-year limitation period, which does not begin to run until three conditions are cumulatively satisfied: the infringement has ceased, the claimant knew or should have known of the infringing conduct and the harm it caused and the identity of the infringer is known. The limitation period is suspended for the duration of the Competition Council’s investigation and for any court proceedings challenging the underlying infringement decision, including where the parties are engaged in alternative dispute resolution regarding the damages claim.

Where the relevant conduct predates the entry into force of GEO 39/2017 on 8 June 2017, the shorter three-year general limitation period under the Civil Code applies instead of the five years introduced by the Damages Directive framework, since the substantive extension of the limitation period is not applied retroactively.

This distinction has been material in several Trucks Cartel cases concerning conduct that ceased well before the transposition of the Directive. Even under the general three-year rule, the same subjective knowledge requirement applies, so that time only begins to run once the claimant is reasonably able to identify the infringement, the harm and the identity of the infringer, a standard which the appellate courts have interpreted restrictively in the claimant’s favour. In one case, the first-instance court initially held that the three-year general limitation period under the Civil Code applied, running from the date the European Commission’s decision was issued, but the Bucharest Court of Appeal overturned this on the basis of the ECJ’s Cogeco ruling, holding that the mere publication of a press release is not sufficient to trigger the limitation period and that time should instead run from publication of the decision in the Official Journal of the European Union.

Private antitrust litigation in Romania is lengthy, reflecting both the complexity of the underlying economic issues and the procedural hurdles created by successive changes to the transposing legislation. Based on the cases resolved or pending to date, a claim can be expected to take between three and eight years to reach a final resolution across the first instance, appeal and, where applicable, further appeal on points of law, with cases involving disclosure requests directed at the Competition Council or the appointment of experts tending toward the upper end of that range. Where a related challenge to the underlying infringement decision is pending, courts frequently exercise their discretion to stay the damages proceedings, which alone can add a further two to five years before the claim resumes.

In Romania specifically, several of the leading Trucks Cartel cases illustrate how retrial can extend proceedings well beyond a typical first-instance timeline: cases were sent back for retrial by the Bucharest Court of Appeal and the High Court of Cassation and Justice, respectively, several years after the original claims were filed, meaning that neither case has yet produced a final ruling on the merits notwithstanding having been filed in 2020 and 2021 respectively. However, older damages claims based on abuse of dominance infringements were resolved more quickly by final ruling.

Romania has no procedural framework specifically providing for class or collective actions in the field of competition damages. Romania has transposed the Representative Actions Directive (EU) 2020/1828 through Law No 414/2023, but that framework is confined to infringements listed in its Annex, which does not include competition law; as a result, collective redress under Law No 414/2023 is not directly available for private antitrust damages claims.

Article 66 of Competition Law 21/1996 allows consumer associations to bring damages claims on behalf of consumers. However, no public data exists on such claims and no specific procedural framework implements this provision. Similarly, the right of business associations to bring damages claims for their members is not equivalent to a class or collective action.

In practice, however, the absence of a bespoke class action mechanism in other areas of law has not prevented large groups of claimants from pursuing damages together, since ordinary civil procedure rules on co-participation allow multiple plaintiffs to bring a joint claim through common representatives. Although not related to private antitrust enforcement, the scale that ordinary co-participation can achieve is illustrated by earlier consumer banking litigation: publicly available court records show clusters of approximately 520 and 580 plaintiffs joining single claims against one bank between 2010 and 2012 and clusters of approximately 360 plaintiffs each joining separate claims against another bank over the same period, all concerning abusive clauses (unfair interest-rate terms) in consumer loan agreements and not competition-related cases.

A pending legislative proposal would expressly facilitate such co-participation by natural persons in competition damages claims and would separately grant the Ministry of Finance standing to claim damages suffered by public authorities, although it would not introduce a true class action mechanism.

Romania does not operate a dedicated class action regime for private antitrust enforcement; thus it has no opt-in or opt-out system such as those in some other jurisdictions. Where consumers pursue related claims for unfair commercial practices or unfair contract terms that fall within the scope of Law No 414/2023, an opt-in mechanism applies to any request for remedial measures, requiring each consumer to provide individual, dated written authorisation before the claim is filed. Ordinary co-participation by multiple claimants in a single competition damages action does not require a comparable formal opt-in, but each represented claimant’s power of attorney must be specific to the claim and executed before the proceedings begin.

By way of comparison, several other European jurisdictions have experimented with bundling mechanisms or foundation-based vehicles that function, in substance, as collective vehicles for damages claims, but Romania has not adopted any equivalent mechanism, so every claimant, whether proceeding individually or as part of a co-participation cluster, must be individually identified and must individually establish its own harm and causal link.

Both direct and indirect purchasers have standing to claim damages under Romanian law. Indirect purchasers benefit from a rebuttable presumption that an overcharge suffered by the direct purchaser was passed on to them, provided they demonstrate the existence of an infringement, an overcharge affecting the direct purchaser and their own acquisition of the goods or services affected by the infringement.

In practice, the majority of Romanian claims to date have been brought by direct purchasers, particularly in the Trucks Cartel litigation, where claims by indirect purchasers are also common given that many vehicles were acquired through independent dealers or leasing arrangements; direct purchaser claims are more typical where the claimant has a direct contractual relationship with the infringer, as seen in cases against railway and electricity distribution operators. Romanian courts do not appear to have coordinated with each other or considered judgments obtained by claimants at other levels of the same supply chain, to guard against double recovery for the same infringement.

Across Europe, approximately 87% of cartel damages actions were brought by direct purchasers and only around 7% by indirect purchasers, a gap the researchers attributed to the practical difficulty indirect purchasers face in proving the extent to which an overcharge was passed on to them. Romanian practice broadly mirrors this pattern, with the leading cases brought by private companies and only a handful of claims against infrastructure operators, brought by direct purchasers with a regulated public-sector counterparty.

The Damages Directive framework requires national courts to take due account of related actions and judgments concerning the same infringement at other levels of the supply chain in order to avoid under- or over-compensation and while this obligation applies as a matter of EU law in Romania, no reported Romanian judgment has yet had to apply it, given the small number of cases in which both direct and indirect purchaser claims have proceeded in parallel to judgment.

Romania has no formal class certification procedure, since the jurisdiction does not operate a class action mechanism for antitrust private enforcement. Multiple claimants may still proceed together as co-claimants under ordinary civil procedure rules and past banking litigation has shown that several hundred claimants can be joined in a single case through common representatives, but even in such cases the existence of harm, causation and quantum must be established individually for each claimant rather than on a class-wide basis.

Moreover, as part of its assessment of the claim’s legal requirements, the court examines whether the claimant has capacity and standing and whether the statutory requirements for bringing the action are satisfied. The defendant may raise these issues in the statement of defence and the court typically addresses them at the preliminary stage of the proceedings, before examining the merits.

Follow-on and stand-alone claims for private competition damages brought under GEO 170/2020 fall within the exclusive jurisdiction of the Bucharest Tribunal, irrespective of where the parties are domiciled. Where a claim is brought against a foreign defendant, Romanian courts have accepted jurisdiction on the basis of Article 7(2) of EU Regulation No 1215/2012, which allows a claimant to sue in tort in the courts of the place where the harmful event occurred and have rejected challenges to jurisdiction raised by non-Romanian defendants on this basis.

As a matter of applicable law, Romanian substantive law is expected to govern a competition damages claim relating to harm suffered on the Romanian market, consistent with the general EU conflict-of-laws rule that damages claims are governed by the law of the state whose market is or is likely to be, affected.

Jurisdictional challenges by non-Romanian defendants have been a recurring feature of the leading Trucks Cartel litigations, with defendants unsuccessfully arguing that the Romanian courts lacked general jurisdiction; in each case, the Bucharest Tribunal held that Article 7(2) of Regulation No 1215/2012 conferred jurisdiction because the harmful event, namely the payment of an inflated price, occurred in Romania, a conclusion the appellate courts have not disturbed.

Disclosure of evidence in Romanian competition damages litigation is governed by GEO 170/2020, under which both claimants and defendants may request disclosure of relevant evidence from the other party or from third parties. A request must be supported by a reasoned justification, based on reasonably available facts and evidence sufficient to render the claim for damages plausible and disclosure is limited to specified items or narrowly defined categories of evidence rather than general or speculative discovery. In assessing proportionality, courts consider how well the claim is supported by available evidence, the cost of disclosure (particularly for third parties) and whether the material sought is confidential.

Disclosure of the Competition Council’s own file is subject to a subsidiarity requirement, meaning it may only be ordered where the evidence cannot reasonably be obtained from the parties or other third parties and courts have shown a degree of caution in this respect. Nonetheless, disclosure orders directed at the Council’s investigation file have been granted in practice, including in one telecom case, where the Bucharest Tribunal ordered disclosure of documents relevant to quantifying the claimants’ damages and in another case, where the court partially granted disclosure of specific evidence from the European Commission’s Trucks Cartel file. A party that fails to comply with a disclosure order or that destroys relevant evidence, may be fined and may also see the relevant fact treated by the court as proven against it.

Where disclosure would expose confidential information, Romanian courts have a range of protective measures available under GEO 170/2020, including redacting sensitive passages from disclosed documents, holding closed hearings, restricting access to the material to the parties’ lawyers and appointed experts and requiring that expert reports themselves be prepared in a manner that preserves confidentiality. Courts also frequently allow especially sensitive documents to be filed in a special court registry accessible only to the judge and the parties, so that such material does not form part of the general case file, which under certain conditions would become available to third parties or the press.

Separately, GEO No 25/2019 on the protection of trade secrets allows a party to seek similar protective measures, such as limiting access to hearings or to the recordings and transcripts of hearings, for information such as pricing policies, internal pricing methodologies, risk assessments and other non-public commercial data and courts may combine measures under both instruments where a disclosure request touches on both litigation-specific confidentiality and genuine trade secrets.

Legal professional privilege is protected in Romanian civil proceedings, including in private antitrust litigation and courts have recognised that attorney-client privileged material cannot be compelled into disclosure even where it forms part of a competition authority’s investigation file.

More broadly, the Civil Procedure Code permits courts to deny the production of documents if doing so would violate a legal duty of confidentiality or risk criminal prosecution for a party. As a result, legal advice privilege is among several established grounds for resisting disclosure.

The protection of privilege operates alongside, but is analytically distinct from, the general restrictions on third-party and media access to court files, since privileged material is excluded from disclosure to the opposing party in the first place, whereas the restrictions on public and media access primarily concern material that has already been placed on the court file and instead limit who outside the proceedings may view it.

Leniency statements and settlement submissions made to the Competition Council enjoy absolute protection from disclosure in Romanian private damages proceedings. A court may review such a document only to confirm its nature as a leniency statement or settlement submission, without the parties gaining access to its content. Settlement submissions that have since been withdrawn or information prepared specifically for the Competition Council’s proceedings may be disclosed, but only after the Council has adopted its decision and Romanian courts have applied this protection in practice by declining requests for disclosure of leniency-file material even while granting disclosure of other parts of an investigation file.

This absolute protection is consistent with the Damages Directive’s own treatment of leniency statements and settlement submissions, which are shielded from disclosure indefinitely in order to preserve the effectiveness of leniency programmes as a public enforcement tool. Romanian courts have applied this rule even where a party argues that the leniency material would be highly probative of the extent of an infringement or of an individual defendant’s role within it. By contrast, other categories of evidence held on the Competition Council’s file, such as internal Council correspondence, information voluntarily submitted by third parties or evidence gathered during an inspection, remain disclosable subject to the ordinary relevance, necessity and proportionality requirements and subject to the general subsidiarity principle that such material may only be sought from the Council once it cannot reasonably be obtained from the parties themselves.

Witnesses in Romanian civil proceedings, including private antitrust litigation, give oral evidence at a court hearing after being summoned and are cross-examined by the parties’ counsel. Counsels and opposing parties do not ask questions directly; they do so through the judge. Romanian procedural law restricts testimony from persons with a specific connection to a party to the case and in one proceeding this restriction was invoked.

Witness evidence plays a comparatively modest role in Romanian competition damages litigation relative to documentary and expert evidence, since the central factual disputes in most cases, namely the existence and extent of an overcharge, are considered more reliably resolved through pricing data and econometric analysis than through oral testimony.

Expert evidence plays a central role in Romanian private damages litigation, given the complexity of quantifying overcharges and other forms of harm. Rather than requiring the parties to converge on a single methodology, Romanian courts typically appoint an independent expert or a panel of experts, most often specialising in econometrics, financial accounting or business valuation, to provide their opinion on quantification of damages, while also permitting each party to have a counsel-appointed expert to challenge or support the court-appointed expert’s findings; where both parties request expert evidence, the associated costs may be split between them.

The choice of expert can itself become contentious. In one Romanian case, the defendant proposed appointing an international firm rather than Romanian academic specialists, arguing that domestic experts lacked the necessary specialisation. At the same time, the claimant strongly opposed this, arguing there was no principled basis to discriminate against Romanian specialists and raising concerns about the independence of an international firm that might have or seek, other commercial relationships with a large multinational group; the court ultimately favoured a multidisciplinary panel combining econometric, financial-accounting and valuation expertise. The Romanian approach of relying on court-appointed multidisciplinary panels, supplemented by party-appointed experts, sits within a broader, though not universal, European practice of judicial reliance on independent expertise to resolve complex quantification disputes.

Generally, Romanian law adheres strictly to a compensatory approach to damages and no Romanian court has held that private antitrust damages should have a punitive or exemplary effect.

The same principles cover antitrust damages actions. As such, Romanian courts apply the principle of full compensation, meaning that a successful claimant is entitled to recover its actual loss, typically the overcharge paid as a result of the infringement, any lost profits it can establish and legal interest.

Statutory legal interest may be either remunerative or punitive. Government Ordinance 13/2011 governs statutory interest and sets the legal interest rate.

Case law diverges on the type of interest to be awarded in such cases. Nevertheless, ECJ case law generally holds that interest runs from the date the harm occurred until actual payment. However, Romanian case law on tort liability is divergent and holds that interest runs only after a final court ruling awards damages.

Quantification typically relies on expert evidence applying one or more recognised methods, such as comparing prices before and after the infringement, comparing affected and unaffected markets, cost-based or financial analysis or regression analysis. While the 20% overcharge presumption favours claimants, the defendant may rebut it with evidence. As such, expert opinions aim to prove the actual extent of damages.

In one of the Romanian cases in which damages were quantified and awarded, the court ordered payment of an overcharge of approximately EUR3.13 million based on a comparison of gross and net price lists across a large sample of transactions, together with compensation for related pollution-standard costs, lost profits and penalties, although the resulting percentage of overcharge could not be definitively established.

The pass-on defence is available in Romania, as described in more detail at 2.5 Pass-On Defence and operates only to reduce the damages recoverable rather than to defeat liability altogether.

Consistent with the joint and several liability principle under the Damages Directive framework as transposed by GEO 170/2020, any infringer may in principle be held liable for the whole of the harm caused by the infringement. As such, a claimant may pursue full compensation from a single defendant even where several undertakings participated in the same infringement. Furthermore, claimants may argue for the existence of umbrella effects against undertakings that did not themselves infringe but whose own prices were influenced by the infringement of others.

In practice, Romanian claimants in cartel cases have sought joint and several liability from all defendants without the courts being required to apportion responsibility between co-infringers.

Consistent with the EU framework, an immunity recipient granted full immunity from fines by the Competition Council benefits from a corresponding limitation of its civil liability. Such an infringer is, as a rule, jointly and severally liable only towards its own direct or indirect purchasers or providers and is liable towards other injured parties only where those parties are unable to obtain full compensation from the other participants in the infringement.

Romanian law in principle allows an infringer that has paid more than its share of joint and several liability to bring a contribution claim against its co-infringers. However, no reported Romanian case has so far involved a contribution claim being brought following a competition damages award. This is likely attributable to the small number of cartel damages actions concluded on the merits to date.

Contribution claims should in principle be governed by general rules. As such, when apportioning contribution among co-infringers, factors such as each infringer’s relative responsibility for the harm caused, including its role in the cartel, its market share, turnover and duration of participation, would typically be relevant. This also aligns with criteria applied by other European courts.

Romanian law provides for urgent interim relief, which allows a party to obtain a provisional measure without a full trial on the merits where the matter is urgent, the measure sought is provisional in nature and it does not prejudge the substantive dispute; equivalent measures exist to preserve evidence pending the taking of proof.

These general mechanisms are, in theory, available in a private antitrust context, for instance to preserve evidence or to prevent irreparable harm pending judgment, but no reported Romanian private antitrust case has so far involved a claimant seeking or obtaining injunctive relief of this kind, so no settled practice yet exists as to how such an application would be tested, granted or reversed on the merits.

Alternative dispute resolution is available and encouraged in Romanian antitrust damages litigation. GEO 170/2020 expressly allows the court to suspend a pending damages action for up to two years where the parties are engaged in consensual dispute resolution regarding the claim. While ADR is not mandated, several follow-on claims arising from the first European Commission Trucks Cartel decision were resolved through out-of-court settlements once a final infringement decision had already established liability. Existing precedent on damages shows that settlement is most attractive once the legal and factual landscape for a claim has become clearer.

Beyond the specific two-year stay mechanism under GEO 170/2020, Romania has a general mediation framework under Law No 192/2006, which allows parties to any civil dispute, including a private antitrust litigation, to refer their dispute to a certified mediator, whether before or after litigation has commenced. A settlement reached through mediation can be given the force of a court judgment.

In the antitrust damages context specifically, the settlements reported to date, including those following the first European Commission Trucks Cartel decision, appear to have been negotiated directly between the parties rather than through formal mediation, suggesting that direct settlement negotiation, rather than mediation as such, remains the more common form of consensual dispute resolution once a final infringement decision has effectively established liability. However, little public information is available on such settlement proceedings.

Traditional third-party litigation funding, as seen in some other European jurisdictions, remains largely untested in Romania. Law No 414/2023 is currently the only Romanian framework that expressly addresses third-party funding, but only in the specific context of collective consumer redress actions brought by qualified entities and it does not extend to competition law infringements.

A related but similarly novel practice is assigning individual claimants’ litigation rights to a single entity to pursue a consolidated damages claim, which Romanian courts have not yet tested and would likely challenge on the validity and scope of the assignment.

Romanian civil procedure requires a claimant to pay a stamp duty calculated as a percentage of the value of its claim and cases to date show that this can be a very high cost (eg, a court stamp duty of around EUR100,000 in one abuse-of-dominance case). Natural persons may qualify for waivers, reductions or instalment plans in respect of this duty depending on their income, while legal persons may only obtain reductions or instalment plans and never a full exemption and only in limited circumstances such as where the duty would exceed 10% of recent average net income or would significantly affect ongoing operations.

Costs are further affected by expert and disclosure-related fees, which can be substantial.

Romanian procedural law does not provide for a distinct security-for-costs mechanism comparable to that available in some common law jurisdictions, although a party may be required to advance certain costs, such as expert fees, as a condition of obtaining the evidence it has requested.

Romanian civil procedure generally follows a loser-pays principle, under which the unsuccessful party bears the successful party’s reasonably incurred costs, including stamp duty, lawyer fees and expert fees. Courts have discretion to reduce disproportionate lawyer fees having regard to the complexity of the case.

Appeals are available at two further levels above the Bucharest Tribunal, which sits as the court of first instance for private antitrust claims brought under GEO 170/2020. A first appeal (apel) is settled by the Bucharest Court of Appeal, which may review both the factual findings and the legal reasoning of the first-instance judgment, while a further appeal (recurs) is settled by the High Court of Cassation and Justice, but is limited to points of law.

An appeal on points of law (recurs) before the High Court of Cassation and Justice must be based on one of the specific grounds listed in the Civil Procedure Code, such as a wrongful application of the law, a breach of the rules of jurisdiction or a judgment lacking adequate legal reasoning, rather than on a fresh assessment of the facts, which remains the exclusive jurisdiction of the first-instance court and the court of appeal.

Looking ahead, we expect increased popularity and awareness of private antitrust litigation, especially in follow-on damages claims. This is reasonable given the Competition Council’s ongoing investigations.

According to the Romanian Competition Council activity report published for 2025, 14 new investigations were opened into possible competition law infringements and about:

• 65% of these concern possible anticompetitive agreements (horizontal or vertical);
• 21% concern horizontal agreements specifically;
• 29% concern vertical agreements; and
• 7% concern abuse of dominant position.

The report also notes that 18 investigations were closed in 2025 covering:

• horizontal and vertical agreements in medical waste disposal;
• a horizontal no-poach agreement in the auto-sector skilled labour market;
• horizontal agreements in vehicle maintenance/repair services;
• a vertical agreement in paints and coatings;
• abuse of dominance and vertical resale-price-fixing in heated tobacco wholesale;
• a vertical agreement in luxury sunglasses; and
• horizontal bid-rigging in road works, diving equipment supply and forestry services.

Furthermore, we reasonably expect private enforcement cases to surge in consumer-facing businesses, as Romanian law practitioners are familiarised with consumer protection law and remedies, as well as the digital markets sector and the legislation applicable to the industry.