Rainer Becker

Director for Medical Products and Innovation, DG SANTE at European Commission

Speaker

Rainer Becker heads the unit in DG Competition responsible for antitrust enforcement in the European Competition Network, for private enforcement and for cooperation with national courts. He has extensive competition law experience, both from public and private practice.

Prior to his current position, he was in charge of the European Commission's antitrust enforcement in the area of pharmaceuticals and health, which included cases on pay-for-delay, excessive pricing and exclusionary abuses of dominance. Before that, Rainer led the unit coordinating the Commission’s antitrust cases and developing competition policy in this area. He also served in different other functions in the Commission, developing, for instance, the EU legislation on facilitating the compensation of victims of competition infringements and working on antitrust and merger cases in manufacturing and consumer goods industries.

Before joining the Commission in 2004, Rainer was a senior associate in an international law firm, where he advised clients across a range of industries on European and German merger control, antitrust and cross-border litigation.

Rainer is also a visiting professor at Heidelberg University and has published and spoken widely on issues of competition policy, general EU law and comparative law.

Born in 1969, he studied law, and Spanish & French literature at universities in Germany, Spain and Canada, and holds Ph.D. (Trier), LL.M. (McGill) and Ass./Ref. iur. (Rh.-Pfalz) degrees. He is fluent in German, English, French and Spanish.