Hello, welcome back. I'm James Panicki, Mlexis Brussels Managing Editor, and with me

two leading lights of MNex's Brussels antitrust posse. Lewis Crofts is Mlex's chief global correspondent.

He covers antitrust policy and enforcement. Matthew Newman is our senior correspondent

and he covers antitrust and cartel investigations. That's a lot of antitrust expertise crammed into

one room. Lewis, Matthew, welcome back. Hi, yeah. Thank you. Now, the EU Court of Justice made a

decision this week, which we had expected to indicate the fate of a penalty worth over a billion euros,

that amount again one billion euros imposed on US chip maker Intel by the EU regulator.

Instead, the court caught most observers by surprise by deciding not to decide.

It handed the problem back to the lower tier general court, whence it had come in the first place.

But to quote a 1970s Canadian prog rock band, if you decide not to decide, you have still made a choice.

And we'll talk about what this judgment means in just a moment.

But Matthew, you were in Luxembourg on Wednesday for the ruling.

Walk us through the decision, just in very very general terms what do the judges say well it was electric atmosphere down

there and people were waiting for this either to be completely in line with the advocate

general's opinion and they weren't disappointed because the Advocate General had said that the case should be set aside and sent back to the general court.

And so set aside is a bit cumbersome, but it means essentially that the general court has not done a good job on this particular appeal, and they have to look at it again.

And I mean, it would be easy for the judges of the general court to take offense at this, because they're essentially saying, look, you haven't thought it through adequately.

They focused on the issue of, obviously, of rebates and that's central to this case.

But just take us a few steps back and just remind us what this Intel case is about.

Sure.

So what happened is the Court of Justice told the general court that they had failed to look at a very

important aspect of Intel's defense.

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