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EU ministers will on Friday press Brussels to crack down on multinational companies that force retailers to pay sharply different prices for the same branded product, such as chocolate or biscuits, costing consumers an estimated €14bn a year.

Eight governments will present a paper to the European Commission asking it to toughen single-market rules to stop effective bans on so-called parallel trading, in which retailers purchase products more cheaply from another member state.

The commission on Thursday fined Mondelez, the maker of Toblerone and Philadelphia cheese, €337.5mn for restricting wholesalers from buying biscuits, chocolate and coffee in one member state, where prices may be low, to sell in another. “It’s illegal,” Margrethe Vestager, competition commissioner, said of the ban.

But governments and retailers say these practices are common across Europe’s single market, which is supposed to eradicate such barriers to trade within the union.

Smaller countries such as Belgium, Croatia, Denmark and Greece are among those backing a proposal from the Netherlands to end so-called “territorial supply constraints” (TSCs), what the proposal described as “different prices within the EU for identical products”.

The group wants an explicit ban on contracts containing such conditions and the abolition of a requirement to provide lengthy labels in a local language. This could be replaced by a QR code taking customers to a website in their language.

Competition investigations such as the probe into Mondelez are time-consuming and rely on evidence from wholesalers and retailers who are reluctant. 

“If you try to buy branded goods from another country the producer will cut off your supply. And some big brands you have to stock,” said a retail executive, who declined to be named.   

Dutch government research found TSCs applied to 1 in 25 products, with prices on average 10 per cent higher than in the cheapest markets.
A European Commission study of 16 member states in 2020 found that TSCs cost consumers €14.1bn annually.

Micky Adriaansens, economy minister of the Netherlands, said: “Removing trade barriers should be a key priority for the single market. This helps in keeping consumer retail prices for food and non-food products fair — something which is especially important in times of high consumer prices.

“The eight member states are proposing a concrete way forward towards an EU ban on TSCs by amending existing or new common EU rules or instruments,” she added.

Asked by reporters if new rules were needed, Vestager said: “It’s illegal to prevent traders to buy in one member state and to sell in another.”

“We hope this case will work as a deterrent . . . we have more cases in the pipeline,” she added.

Ursula von der Leyen, Commission president, has said improving the single market and business competitiveness would be a priority of her second term if she is reappointed after June elections.

Enrico Letta, the former Italian prime minister, highlighted the issue of buying restrictions in his recent report on the future of the single market.

Separately Kyriakos Mitsotakis, the Greek premier who is an important figure in Von der Leyen’s European people’s party, has written to her to urge action.

In a letter seen by the Financial Times he wrote that Greece and other member states suffer from “the unreasonably high prices” for branded essential consumer goods compared to some other EU countries.

He said it was crucial the bloc showed voters before the elections that it could “intervene decisively, swiftly and effectively in order to find solutions to these problems”.

He also called for a ban on companies selling the same product under a different brand name in different member states. 

The shootings of two men on opposite ends of the country this month have refocused attention on deadly force standards for police — and how officers should respond to the sight of a gun. In both cases, the men were fatally shot within moments, even as they held their weapons pointed down.

On May 3, “fourth-person” reports of a domestic disturbance at an apartment complex in Okaloosa County, Florida, brought a sheriff’s deputy to the front door of 23-year-old U.S. Airman Roger Fortson, who was alone in his apartment. The deputy’s body camera video shows him pausing to listen at Fortson’s closed door, then knocking, waiting, knocking and again and calling out, “Sheriff’s office, open the door!”

The door opens and Fortson comes into view: a slender African-American man dressed in jeans and standing barefoot on the tiles of his entryway. His left hand is coming up in an open-palm gesture; his right hand is holding a pistol. It’s held loosely, pointed at the floor. In the second it takes him to open the door, the deputy says, “Step back,” unholsters and draws his gun, and fatally shoots Fortson.

“It wasn’t a good exchange, he never fired a weapon or anything,” says Benjamin Crump, an attorney. who represents Fortson’s family and appeared at the funeral. “He respected authority,” he says of Fortson.

The Okaloosa Sheriff’s Office initially called the shooting “self-defense,” but the case is now under investigation by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Ten days later, another man holding a gun pointed down was shot and killed by police during a domestic disturbance call, this time in Anchorage, Alaska. The morning after the shooting, Police Chief Bianca Cross said the man, Kristopher Handy, had “raised the long gun towards officers,” but a video released later by one of Handy’s neighbors appears to contradict that. It shows Handy outside the apartment building, walking toward officers with an apparent long gun held roughly parallel with his legs. Like Fortson, Handy was shot within moments of facing the police.

The Anchorage Police Department is investigating; Handy’s family is calling for the release of body camera videos of the incident.

Kristopher Handy faces police during a domestic distburbance call in Anchorage, Alaska, moments before being shot. This image comes from a video recorded by a neighbor, who says Handy never pointed the long gun he was holding

Virginia Miller/YouTube

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The recent deaths have renewed questions about whether police are allowed to shoot someone who’s armed, but not pointing the weapon.

“There is no hard and fast rule as it relates to that,” says Rodney Bryant, a 34-year veteran of the Atlanta Police Department, former chief, and now president of the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives.

“Sometimes you may have a person that’s not pointing that still may pose a significant threat to law enforcement officers,” Bryant says. “But… you can have a very similar situation and it’s clear the person is not a threat.”

No Hard And Fast Rule

What complicates matters for police is the science of human reaction times. At Washington State University, Stephen James runs a lab that studies this by running subjects — including police officers — through simulations. Those studies have demonstrated a two-to-three-second disadvantage for officers who wait to have a weapon pointed at them.

“There’s no way a human can see the weapon coming up, make a decision about whether or not it’s a threat, then decide to press the trigger and then the electrical signal has to go from the brain down the nervous system into the finger,” James says. “If you have to wait for all of that, the other person will get a shot off first.”

Because of this lag, James says officers across the nation are trained that “action will beat reaction.”

But he says that’s not an excuse to preemptively shoot anyone holding a gun.

James also takes part in state-mandated reviews of police shootings, and he says police have to keep the law in mind, especially the1989 U.S. Supreme Court case Graham v. Connor, requiring an officer’s decision to shoot to be judged by a “reasonableness” standard.

“When we look at the totality of the circumstances, is the individual acting in a threatening manner? Are they being compliant or are they being defiant?” Even the location of the person could end up determining whether a shooting is justified.

“[In] the case in Florida, it was within the threshold of his own home. And that is absolutely protected by the Second Amendment as long as he could legally hold the firearm,” James says. “It’s very different when you’re out in public … and we don’t allow open carry of guns in schools, for example.”

“It’s hard to train for this,” says Chief Bryant. He says he’s seen some departments that emphasize the research showing the time disadvantage for officers who wait; others emphasize the need to back up and de-escalate a potential confrontation, if there’s time.

What he has seen over three decades in policing, he says, is that officers are facing this situation more often, especially as states have legalized open carry. And it can take time for an officer to understand what’s happening.

“I’m arriving on the scene, and the person that’s taking the gun from one person — from the volatile person — is there intervening, and I pull up and they have the gun,” Bryant says. “I don’t know who’s who, but I challenge that person as well [to drop the gun],” he says.

“When you have the proliferation of weaponry that we’ve seen, you just encounter it more,” he says. “Seeing the gun will be very common, and we have to be prepared for that on both sides.”