"Competition. High Courts change the rules - Millionaire fines at risk" (with Sara Estima Martins)

«The judgement has not yet been made available - legal experts stress the importance of reading it in full - but the media has reported that the STJ considers that, read or unread, emails are always correspondence. "Although the STJ judgement was adopted in criminal proceedings - while the two TC judgements were handed down in the context of competition offence proceedings - it nevertheless reveals a clear consensus in the higher courts on the answer to a long-debated question: the authority competent to issue a warrant to search and seize electronic correspondence, open or closed, is always the investigating judge and not the Public Prosecutor's Office," says Sara Estima Martins.
For the Partner in the Competition and European Union Department at the SRS Law firm, "it seems inevitable that this STJ judgement will further reinforce the difficulties already faced in various AdC cases". There are, moreover, appeals to the STJ on the issue of emails in PCA administrative offence cases and the expectation behind the scenes is that the higher court will rule in the same direction, which would be a lethal setback for the regulator's position.»