Antoine Winckler is a partner based in the Brussels office.
Mr. Winckler's practice focuses on European and French competition law, including cartel investigations, merger control, and market dominance. Mr. Winckler has advised clients in numerous cartel cases, including those relating to cement, copper tubes, seamless steel tubes, paper, elevators, LCDs, cables and freight forwarding. He also has been counsel to clients in merger control procedures, including the Nestlé/Perrier, EADS, Elf/TotalFina, Schneider/Legrand, Arcelor-Mittal and Danone Numico cases.
Mr. Winckler has extensive experience representing corporate clients and financial institutions, as well as governments and public entities, regarding EU State aid rules. In this area, Mr. Winckler has advised on the Ford/Volkswagen, Credit Lyonnais and France Telecom cases, as well as other State aid matters.
Mr. Winckler has vast experience representing clients before the European Commission, the European Courts in Luxembourg, the French Competition Authority and the Court of Appeals in Paris. His litigation experience includes many major competition and State aid cases such as Matra v. Commission, Microsoft v. Commission, Schneider v. Commission, Lagardère/Odile Jacob.
Mr. Winckler is distinguished as a leading competition/antitrust lawyer by
Chambers Global,
Who’s Who Legal and the
PLC Which Lawyer? Yearbook. He has also been named "Best Competition Lawyer 2012" in Belgium by
Best Lawyers.
Mr. Winckler joined the firm in 1985 and became a partner in 1992. Prior to joining the Cleary Gottlieb, Mr. Winckler was an administrative judge. He received law degrees from the Université de Nice Sophia Antipolis in 1984 and from the Institut d'Études Politiques de Paris in 1979. Mr. Winckler graduated from the French Ecole Nationale d'Administration in 1983 and the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1976.
Mr. Winckler is a member of the Bars of Paris and Brussels. He is admitted to practice before the EU Court of Justice, the General Court and the Court of Appeals in Paris. He is also a member of the International Bar Association, the Association des Juristes Européens, the Association de Formation et d'Enseignement Continu (AFEC), and the European Competition Lawyers Forum. His native language is French, and he is fluent in English, German, Italian and Spanish.
Mr. Winckler currently teaches at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques Law School in Paris.
Mr. Winckler is widely published on various aspects of EU constitutional and competition law, including "Collective Dominance under EC Merger Control Rules," published in the
Common Law Market Review; "Legal Privilege and EC Competition Rules," published in the Belgian journal
Bruylant; and "State Guarantees for Financial Institutions: of State Aid and Moral Hazard," published by the
Institut Universitaire Européen. In addition, he is co-author of a treatise on merger control rules, which includes a comparative study of main merger control regimes in EU countries ("La Pratique Communataire du Contrôle des concentrations" De Boeck-Wesmael, 1998). Mr. Winckler is also the Editor for the section on Merger Control in the journal
Revue Lamy de la Concurrence, and is a member of the Editorial Review Board for the publication
Oxford Competition Law.