On 16 February 2016, the Bosnian Competition Council made a ruling in favour of the cable operator and Karanović & Nikolić's client – Telemach – in the case against HD Win, the owner of the sports channel "Arena Sport", and a subsidiary of Telekom Serbia. The authority imposed a fine against HD Win for its abuse of dominant position and ordered it to enter into agreement with Telemach in order to allow its subscribers access to Arena Sport.

Delaying the Inevitable

The focus of this dispute has been the refusal of HD Win to offer the Arena Sport channel to Telemach, which is a leading cable operator in Bosnia & Herzegovina and part of the United Group, which was acquired by KKR in 2014 (link to our news). Our team, led by partners Rastko Petaković and Nihad Sijerčić, successfully claimed that HD Win effectively refused to deal with Telemach by engaging in delaying tactics.

In contrast, HD WIN had allowed access to Arena Sport to a myriad of smaller operators, that do not pose a significant threat to its related IPTV business in Bosnia & Herzegovina (Telekomunikacije Republike Srpske, which is another subsidiary of Telekom Serbia), by successfully reaching distribution agreements with those operators in a matter of weeks.

Penalties Applied

After seven months of deliberating on the issue, the Bosnian Competition Council found that HD Win, in doing so, had breached the Bosnian commercial regulations by limiting competition through giving unequal and unfavourable conditions to Telemach in the process of acquiring distribution rights. HD Win was thus – among other penalties (including financial ones) – ordered to provide Telemach with the distribution rights for the requested content according to the same conditions that were applied in making prior agreements with other, minor cable operators in Bosnia & Herzegovina.

This case, led by partners Rastko Petaković and Nihad Sijerčić – the partner from Karanović & Nikolić's Sarajevo office – belongs to an ongoing series of disputes in the field of sports broadcasting rights in Bosnia & Herzegovina, a topic that is of growing importance.