Italy Fines Morellato €25.9M for Price‑Fixing and Online Sales Restrictions

Italy's competition regulator handed Morellato S.p.A. a €25,895,043 fine on March 31, 2026, ruling that the Italian jewellery and watch group had spent more than seven years running an illegal pricing regime across its online distribution network. The conduct, which the Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM) traced from July 20, 2018 to December 23, 2025, centred on two specific practices: capping the discounts retailers were permitted to offer online, and blocking authorised distributors from selling on third-party marketplaces. Global Competition Review described the penalty as a record resale price maintenance fine in Italy.

Resale price maintenance, or RPM, is the mechanism a manufacturer uses to stop independent retailers from undercutting a set price floor. In plain terms: a brand issues "guidance" on maximum discount levels, and retailers who deviate face consequences. For shoppers browsing a multi-brand jewellery site, the practical result is price uniformity where genuine competition should exist. The AGCM found that Morellato did precisely this through written recommendations to retailers specifying exactly how far prices on online sales channels could be reduced. Under the EU's Vertical Block Exemption Regulation, RPM is classified as a hardcore restriction, meaning it cannot be exempted under standard competition rules regardless of context.

What made the case sharper than a typical pricing dispute was the enforcement architecture Morellato built around it. The AGCM found the company actively monitored retailer pricing online, issuing warnings when distributors fell outside the permitted discount range. Breaches were met with order blocks and threats of contract termination, a retaliation mechanism that effectively made the guidance mandatory in practice, even where it appeared advisory on paper.

The marketplace prohibition carried its own contradiction. Morellato banned its authorised distributors from listing products on platforms like Amazon, while the company itself operated a virtual shop on the same platform, using proprietary product codes to control which sellers could upload inventory. The AGCM applied EU competition guidelines directly on this point, noting that marketplace restrictions imposed discriminatorily, where the manufacturer reserves platform access for itself while denying it to distributors, are unlikely to satisfy the legal conditions for exemption under Article 101(3) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

The case did not emerge through regulatory initiative alone. The AGCM opened its formal inquiry on March 18, 2025, following an anonymous tip submitted through its whistleblowing platform. That the complaint arrived through a confidential channel rather than from a named distributor reflects the commercial pressure retailers face when challenging a major supplier.

Morellato is positioned in the mid-range, accessible segment of the Italian market, outside the luxury tier. That positioning matters: luxury brands can invoke brand protection arguments to justify selective distribution controls, but those defences carry considerably less weight when the products in question are accessible-price jewellery and watches.

The ruling sits inside a broader AGCM enforcement push against vertical pricing controls in the accessories and electronics sectors. The authority opened proceedings against watch manufacturers Citizen and Swatch in November 2025, and launched a separate investigation into DJI and its Italian distributor Nital in October 2025. Taken together, the cases signal a deliberate regulatory line: informal price management, enforced digitally through monitoring and retaliation rather than explicit contractual clauses, is squarely within the AGCM's crosshairs.

For brands operating selective distribution networks across Europe, the Morellato decision reinforces that the architecture of enforcement matters as much as the written contract. A price recommendation becomes a cartel when compliance is tracked, deviations are punished, and the manufacturer applies rules to its own distribution channels that it denies to others.