Could Scania Become the “Sweeper” in the Truck Cartel Damages Claims?

Last week, the Spanish Supreme Court held a hearing on several appeals against four Provincial Court rulings regarding Scania’s liability for damages caused by the truck cartel (ES:APV:2025:1280; ES:APA:2025:1505; ES:APV:2025:1600; and ES:APO:2025:3715). Although each appeal is distinct, the hearing focused on the common issues raised by these newer claims.

This post does not aim to summarize the hearing or to speculate about the outcome of the appeals (a matter on which the Supreme Court will surely rule before the end of April). Instead, it focuses on the final point raised by Scania’s counsel in oral argument: could Scania become the “sweeper” in Spanish truck cartel damages litigation? Put differently, can it end up being the defendant against whom claims are still viable even when actions against the manufacturer of the truck actually purchased are no longer available, or are procedurally more difficult.

That question is worth isolating because it goes to the heart of the current phase of the Spanish truck cartel saga. The issue also has a broader European relevance. Because Spanish courts have been at the forefront of truck cartel damages litigation, the way they address the Scania-specific questions may provide useful guidance for courts and practitioners in other Member States.

Truck cartel litigation in Spain has long outgrown the dimensions of ordinary bilateral civil litigation, as noted elsewhere on this blog. By March 2026, there had already been 171 Supreme Court judgments and 5,880 appellate judgments in truck cartel damages litigation, concerning some 35,000 cartelized vehicles. In February 2026, the Supreme Court itself acknowledged that more than 4,000 truck cartel cassation appeals were still pending and that, save for marginal novelties, the main legal issues had already been resolved (see Kluwer Competition Blog 26/3/26).

The litigation against Scania raises a different combination of procedural timing, EU enforcement history, and civil liability rules. That combination may make Scania the defendant against whom certain residual claims can still be brought.

Why Scania is different

The issue stems from the peculiar enforcement history of the trucks cartel. The cartel was sanctioned by the European Commission through two decisions.

The first decision, adopted on 19 July 2016, followed the settlement procedure and concerned MAN, Daimler, Iveco, Volvo/Renault and DAF.

The second decision, adopted on 27 September 2017, concerned Scania alone after it withdrew from settlement. Unlike the settlement decision, it was the product of an adversarial procedure and was therefore much more detailed. A substantial part of the reasoning addressed not only the cartel itself, but also the institutional difficulties inevitably created by a staggered procedure in which one addressee settles and another contests the case. These issues lay at the centre of the EU litigation that followed. The General Court’s judgment of 2 February 2022 (T-799/17, EU:T:2022:48) explicitly addressed the legality of the hybrid settlement procedure, including the presumption of innocence and impartiality objections (see Kluwer Competition Law Blog 7/2/20), and the Court of Justice dismissed Scania’s appeal on 1 February 2024 (C-251/22P, EU:C:2024:103), thereby upholding both the General Court’s judgment and the €880.523 million fine imposed on Scania for participating, from January 1997 to January 2011, in the same single and continuous infringement in the EEA market for medium and heavy trucks.

Although Scania participated in the same cartel as the rest of the truck manufacturers, its position in follow-on damages litigation arises from a later Commission decision that became final much later than the 2016 settlement decision, in particular because Scania was the only truck manufacturer to challenge the Commission’s decision before the EU Courts, which resulted in a lengthy judicial review.

Scania’s defence, however, does not rest only on timing and procedure. It also suggests that the 2017 decision reveals substantive differences capable of narrowing its civil exposure. That argument should not be overstated. The 2017 decision declared the same single and continuous infringement as the 2016 settlement decision, albeit in a fuller and more heavily reasoned form (see Almacén de Derecho 25/9/20). To be sure, it contains nuances about product scope, the evolution of the collusive contacts over time, the role of national subsidiaries after 2004, and the relationship between gross list prices and final transaction prices. But those nuances seem more relevant to the intensity of participation, the proof of harm or the quantification of damages than to the existence of liability for participation in the cartel itself.

Why timing matters

Against that background, the staggered enforcement history is not just an administrative curiosity. In private enforcement, timing matters. In the Spanish truck cartel litigation, limitation, the applicable remedial framework and even the practical viability of claims have all been shaped by dates: the date of the Commission decision, the date when it became sufficiently knowable to victims, the date of its judicial confirmation, and the date on which claimants brought suit. In the Scania branch of the litigation, all of those markers arrived later than they did for the settling manufacturers. That does not change the infringement. But it may change the procedural position of claims against Scania.

The Spanish Supreme Court’s first wave of truck cartel rulings in June 2023 (Kluwer Competition Law Blog 6/7/23), read together with Volvo & DAF (C-267/20, EU:C:2022:494), clarified that the five-year limitation period in Article 74 of the Spanish Competition Act applied to the truck cartel damages actions brought on the basis of the first Commission decision, rather than the previous one-year period. Those rulings also entrenched the now familiar baseline that, where quantification evidence is weak but the existence of harm is established, courts may estimate damages, and in those first-wave cases they confirmed a 5% overcharge as a minimum benchmark.

For present purposes, the key point is that, if Article 74 of the Spanish Competition Act applies to claims against Scania, the earliest straightforward time-barring date would appear to be 1 February 2030. The Commission’s decision against Scania, adopted on 27 September 2017, became final only on 1 February 2024, when the Court of Justice dismissed Scania’s appeal. Under Article 74(3) of the Spanish Competition Act, the limitation period remains interrupted until one year after the infringement decision becomes final; only then does the five-year period run. On that basis, claims against Scania would not be time-barred before 1 February 2030, assuming the claimant knowledge requirement was already satisfied and no further interruption occurred.

Scania as the residual defendant

That temporal difference is precisely what makes Scania’s position distinctive. Because the decision concerning Scania is later, and because its judicial review concluded much later, claimants argue that actions against Scania fall more clearly within the post-Directive framework, with its more claimant-friendly rules on limitation, presumptions and joint and several liability. Still, the Directive did not create from scratch the basic logic that cartelists are liable for the harm caused by the infringement. As the Court of Justice has made clear, any person may claim compensation for harm caused by an infringement of Article 101 TFEU and, in principle, such an infringement entails the joint and several liability of the infringers (C-312/21 Tráficos Manuel Ferrer, EU:C:2023:99, para. 60). Accordingly, the key issue is not whether Scania may face claims by purchasers of other cartelists’ trucks. It will.It is whether those claims remain legally available against Scania.

That is precisely what gives content to the “sweeper” thesis. Scania would not become the residual defendant because of any substantive difference in the infringement, but because claims that may no longer be actionable against the truck’s manufacturer could still be brought against Scania as a jointly and severally liable co-infringer. The term captures the possibility that Scania may end up absorbing residual exposure from claims that have not yet been adjudicated or compensated and that remain legally actionable against it. This, of course, excludes claims already resolved by final judgment or already compensated, which are barred by ordinary principles of res judicata and full compensation.The metaphor may be novel, but the underlying concern is not: commentators have already noted that, once Scania’s liability became final, it might become the only realistic defendant for some late truck-cartel claims (see e.g., Hausfeld 28/2/22).

There is, moreover, a certain logic to that conclusion. If Scania’s 2017 decision establishes participation in the same single and continuous infringement in materially equivalent terms, the later finality of that decision should not by itself reduce Scania’s civil exposure as compared with the settling manufacturers. The crucial issue is therefore the scope of the infringement established in the decision, not the mere fact that judicial review lasted longer. Where the same single and continuous infringement has been established against different cartelists on the same essential factual and legal basis, it would be difficult to justify a narrower civil exposure solely because one of them pursued a longer course of judicial review.

Limits of the sweeper thesis

Even on that view, important limits remain. Scania is not, and should not become, a universal vacuum cleaner for every unresolved truck cartel claim in Spain.

First, joint and several liability does not eliminate the ordinary limits of damages law. Claimants must still prove harm falling within the scope of the cartel infringement. There can be no double recovery. Claims already compensated are extinguished. Claims already resolved by final judgment remain barred by res judicata. And if a claim is time-barred even against Scania, the later decision cannot revive it. The point is narrower: where a claim remains alive and uncompensated, Scania’s later procedural position may make it the addressee of that claim.

Second, Spanish truck cartel litigation has so far been comparatively narrow in its targeting pattern. Most claims have been brought against the manufacturer of the truck purchased, not against multiple cartelists or against a different cartelist on the basis of joint and several liability (see "Trucks Cartel Damages Claims: Thousand and Odd Judgments issued by Spanish Appeal Courts", Zeitschrift für Europäisches Privatrecht 1/2023, at §3.2). That is one reason why the Scania litigation matters. It forces the courts to confront more directly the consequences of treating the truck cartel as a genuinely plurilateral infringement for the purposes of civil liability.

Third, the appellate case law available so far points in one direction: the courts that have addressed the issue have rejected the idea that the 2017 Scania decision describes a materially different infringement capable of excluding Scania’s civil liability. Instead, it treats the 2016 and 2017 decisions as two enforcement expressions of the same single and continuous infringement (see, e.g., recently, ES:APS:2026:446; ES:APZ:2026:242; ES:APBI:2026:236; ES:APVA:2026:88; ES:APO:2026:533) and some Courts have also begun to accept the consequences that follow from that premise in terms of standing, limitation and joint and several liability (see, e.g., ES:APA:2025:494; ES:APV:2025:1280; ES:APV:2025:1600). If that approach is confirmed, the argument for treating Scania as jointly and severally liable on the same footing as the settling manufacturers becomes considerably stronger.

What is at stake

In my view, the answer to the question in the title should be: yes, in principle— though only in that narrow sense: Scania may become the residual defendant for claims that remain legally available against it, even if they are no longer available against the truck’s manufacturer.. The real question, then, is not whether Scania is different from the other truck manufacturers in substantive terms. It is not. The real question is whether the later timing of the Commission decision against Scania and its later judicial confirmation make Scania the natural residual defendant in this long-running mass litigation, allowing claimants to pursue against it those claims that remain viable and uncompensated even where the truck purchased was manufactured by another cartel participant.

It is difficult to quantify, from public sources alone, how large the remaining pool of potential Scania claims in Spain may be. But it is unlikely to be trivial. Spanish truck-cartel litigation remains highly atomized, and the Court of Justice’s more claimant-friendly interpretation of the limitation rules may encourage some purchasers who did not sue earlier—whether because of cost, uncertainty or litigation risk—to consider claims against Scania now that actions against the truck’s manufacturer may no longer be available or may be procedurally more difficult. Nor is the issue purely Spanish as truck-cartel litigation remains active elsewhere in Europe. Given the leading role Spanish courts have played in resolving truck cartel damages litigation, their approach may prove relevant for courts across Europe still grappling with the private enforcement consequences of the cartel.

More broadly, the point is one of coherence in private enforcement. If Scania participated in the same single and continuous infringement in materially equivalent terms, the delayed finality of the decision against it should not, by itself, place Scania in a more favorable civil position than the settling manufacturers. Delayed finality may postpone certainty; it should not extinguish liability. That is the real point behind the “sweeper” question.

*Disclaimer: The contributor serves as academic consultant of CCS Abogados, the law firm representing the largest number of claimants in the truck cartel in Spain. The views and opinions expressed in this post are his own, and do not necessarily reflect the position of CCS.