An unprecedented amount of financial support has been granted by national authorities to companies to alleviate the economic effects of COVID-19.

As the world slowly comes out of the pandemic, a number of policy questions arise: was state intervention sufficient? Were the instruments appropriate? Has the level-playing field been altered by the uneven capacity of states to dip into their own pockets? Would a European coordinated strategy have been more appropriate?

Our panel's aim is twofold: first, to evaluate what happened during the pandemic, taking stock of the effectiveness of the state aid measures and the competition tools used to respond to and manage the crisis; second, to assess whether any policy changes are necessary to upgrade the toolkit for the next crisis to come. 

Meet our speakers and chair  

Natura Gracia is a partner in the Linklaters Antitrust & Foreign Investment group qualified in Spain and England and Wales. She has over 15 years of experience as a competition lawyer. In addition to her extensive experience in general competition law (particularly behavioural matters and merger control) she specialises in state aid, subsidies, utility regulation and public procurement; her practice also includes contentious EU matters. Natura has advised clients across diverse industry sectors with particular expertise in the energy, water, and transport sectors, as well as advising clients in the pharmaceutical and financial services sectors.

Roberto Alimonti is an expert in competition economics with over 10 years of professional experience, and has significant expertise in state aid and quantification of follow-on antitrust damages. He has acquired a strong reputation for his work on a number of high-profile cases on behalf of private and public sector clients, including competition authorities and sector regulators. These range from cartel and abuse of dominance cases to state aid, litigation and mergers. Roberto works as a Principal at Oxera. He previously worked for one of the Big Four consulting firms in London and at the UK Office of Fair Trading.

Ruben Lapa Maximiano is a Regional Manager and Senior Competition Expert at the OECD in Paris since 2014 and a lecturer at Lille Catholic University since 2015. At the OECD he is responsible for the work on competition policy in Asia Pacific region and coordinates the work on the role of competition policy for the Covid-19 crisis and recovery at the OECD. Before joining the OECD, Mr. Maximiano worked at the European Commission for nearly 5 years, having worked mostly on merger control in a number of sectors and been a part of the Financial Crisis Task Force where he worked on a number of state aid cases in the banking sector.

Angelo Martelli (@angelo_martelli) is Assistant Professor in European and International Political Economy in the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). He worked as a Consultant for the Jobs Group of the World Bank, as a Policy Fellow for the Open Innovation Team of the UK Cabinet Office and HM Treasury and as a Technical Expert for the IMF.

More about this event  

This event is part of the LSE Festival: How Do We Get to a Post-COVID World? running from Monday 13 to Saturday 18 June 2022, with a series of events exploring the practical steps we could be taking to shape a better world. 

The LSE European Institute (@LSEEI) at LSE is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe. In the most recent national Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014) the Institute was ranked first for research in its sector.

Twitter hashtags for this event: #LSEFestival