Van Miert leaves challenging competition legacy for Monti

The annual August shutdown is upon us. The European Union's institutions are on holiday and the decision-making vacuum is made worse this year by the absence of a functioning European Commission.

Commission president Romano Prodi's team does not take up the baton until September, provided the European Parliament agrees, and Jacques Santer's commission, which resigned ignominiously earlier this year, hung on into July in a caretaker role, but is now more or less moribund.

Yet the calm is deceptive. Outgoing competition commissioner Karel van Miert fired off such a barrage of investigations into abuses of dominant position, cross-border cartels, price fixing, illegal state aid and hidden subsidies that governments and business alike are reeling from the onslaught. His final act, and the one that grabbed the most headlines worldwide, was a dawn raid on Coca-Cola.

EU investigators arrived unannounced at the offices of the US drinks giant and associated bottlers in four European countries and confiscated documents. Their mission: to search out alleged abuses of the company's dominant position, offering incentives to retailers to stock only Coke's products.

It seemed particularly uncompromising, given the damaging health scare the previous month which had prompted several countries to ban sales of Coke products until recall measures had been carried out.

But it was a logical move just one month after the commission had fined British Airways almost GBP4.5 million (about HK$56.5 million) for similar offences - and quite in line with the tough van Miert image.