Coca-Cola May Settle EU Antitrust Probe

Coca-Cola Co. moved closer to settling a five-year European Commission antitrust probe after regulators said an offer from the world’s biggest soft-drink maker to revamp its sales practices was “very good.”

“The commission is very satisfied with what is on the table,” commission spokesman Tilman Lueder said Monday about Coca-Cola’s offer to make unspecified changes to its practices in Britain, Germany, Austria, Belgium and Denmark. The commission will consult major customers and competitors for their reactions, Lueder said at a news conference in Brussels.

Coca-Cola Chief Executive E. Neville Isdell, who took over in June, wants to resolve legal issues that dogged his two predecessors over the last five years. The European Union began a probe in 1999, after a complaint by No. 2 soft-drink maker PepsiCo Inc., into whether Coca-Cola was using rebates to persuade retailers to keep competing products off their shelves. Neither Coca-Cola nor the commission released details of the concessions.

“The commission’s market testing is a pretty clear sign that they have something that’s the basis of a settlement,” said Stephen Kinsella, an antitrust lawyer with Herbert Smith in Brussels. “You can see that they seem to think that the concessions will do the trick.”

The commission, the EU’s regulatory arm, in June said it was considering a settlement with Coca-Cola. Competition Commissioner Mario Monti’s five-year term expires in October.

The concessions are “not yet cast in stone and that is why we are consulting the market,” Lueder said. After the informal consultations, the commission will publish a draft decision for all companies and competitors to comment on, he said.

Kinsella said it was unlikely that third parties would derail the settlement. They would have to raise points that haven’t been covered in the commission’s probe, he said.

“Assuming that the commitments address the commission’s concerns, it would be pretty unlikely for third parties to point out a huge hole,” Kinsella said.