City firm Ashurst is set to publish an authoritative report on enforcement actions by individuals over breaches of European Commission (EC) competition rules this summer, having won a prestigious tender process involving 17 rival law firms conducted last year by the EC's directorate-general for competition.

The report was commissioned because private enforcement of EU competition rules is lagging behind public enforcement.

It will consist of a comparative analysis of national rules and case law relating to enforcement of competition rules, encompassing all 25 EU member states including the ten recent accession states, and will explore means of facilitating and improving the enforcement of competition rules.

Under the tender process, firms were invited to submit a prospective lump-sum charge for the work, not exceeding 200,000 (133,000).

Brussels-based Ashurst partner, Denis Waelbroeck, said: 'It has been a huge exercise - the report will be about 600 pages long - and it will confirm there have not been many cases in which damages have been awarded [to individuals].

It will also focus on the difficulties of enforcement, and there are plenty of those.'

Meanwhile, a top City litigator told a recent meeting in Brussels that class actions - which will be one of the areas looked at by Ashurst as part of its report into competition enforcement - will not take off in the UK and the European Union (EU) as they have done in the US.

Addressing a meeting at the British Chamber of Commerce in Brussels, David Gold, Herbert Smith's head of litigation, said: 'In the US there are incentives for lawyers to bring class actions - contingency fees between 30% and 40% can be charged, juries can award potentially massive damages aimed at punishing defendants or rewarding claimants, and claimants are rarely liable for defendants' costs if they lose.'

He contrasted this with the UK: 'By comparison the no-win, no-fee system provides lawyers with negligible fees, the courts are not able to award punitive damages and claimants might be liable to pay defendants' costs if they lose cases.'

He said that UK claimants unable at present to afford litigation should be protected by the introduction of a more realistic legal aid system or be compensated through regulation, for example by the Financial Services Authority using its power to compensate the victims of financial mismanagement.

Jeremy Fleming