Expertise
Kees is a litigation and antitrust consultant in our London office. He has over 25 years’ experience in competition matters, including advising on antitrust damages claims and counselling clients implicated in EU and national cartel investigations.
Kees started his career in The Netherlands and subsequently moved to Brussels to join Hogan Lovells. During the early part of his career, he mainly helped clients caught up in European Commission investigations of alleged cartels and abuse of dominance.
In later years, his practice became more focused on acting for affected businesses in large-scale follow-on cartel damages claims. This has involved developing creative funding solutions that enable clients to litigate, should they wish to do so, on a no win no fee basis.
Kees has acted on some of the largest cartel damages claims to date, including the Air Cargo, Elevators and Trucks litigation. Kees has lectured extensively on EU and competition law at various universities around Europe and is the author of several books and numerous articles on these subjects.
How do you help clients?
In a nutshell, I help clients recover damages from companies that have engaged in cartel or other anti-competitive activity. Victims are entitled to full compensation for the harm suffered due to an infringement of competition law, which covers compensation for actual loss and for loss of profit, in addition to the payment of interest from the time the harm occurred until compensation is paid.
Cartel damages claims are typically brought after businesses have been fined by the European Commission or a national competition authority for breaking the rules that prohibit cartels and other restrictive business practices. Usually, they are filed in at least one of the three preferred jurisdictions for private cartel damages actions in Europe: the UK, The Netherlands and Germany and, increasingly, also in countries like Spain and Italy.
Because of my extensive network of lawyers, economists, and industry experts around Europe, I am frequently asked by clients to help them claim compensation for damages in jurisdictions outside the UK when the English courts do not have jurisdiction.
Experience
- Representing a large group of claimants in a Trucks’ cartel private damages case
- Advising claimants in the Elevators and Escalators Cartel Litigation
- Acting for a major airline in EU cartel proceedings and the Air Cargo follow-on damages actions
- Acting for a mobile phone manufacturer in abuse of dominance proceedings before the European Commission
- Representing a multinational video game company in proceedings brought by the European Commission involving the distribution of game consoles