Dr. Laura Melusine Baudenbacher appointed as new President of the Swiss Competition Commission.

The Federal Council of the Swiss Confederation appointed our law firm partner Dr. Laura Melusine Baudenbacher as president of the Swiss Competition Commission (“ComCo”). Laura Melusine is the youngest president in ComCo’s history and the first office holder to come from legal practice rather than academia.

Raised in Switzerland, the USA, and Luxembourg, she studied law with a focus on European and international law at the University of Berne. She was admitted to the Swiss Bar in 2011 and to the Belgian Bar in 2019. From 2011 to 2016, Laura Melusine clerked for the former president of the Swiss Federal Administrative Court, including in the landmark Elmex and BMW cases. In parallel to her work at the court, she wrote her PhD thesis on the subject “From the common European to the European prohibition of abuse of rights”, which was accepted with summa cum laude by the University of Zurich in 2015.

From 2016 to 2021, Laura Melusine was a lawyer at Linklaters LLP in Brussels and at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP in Brussels and Cologne. In 2021, she was Managing Partner of Baudenbacher Law (Zurich | Brussels), and since 1 January 2022, she is a partner at Nobel Baudenbacher Attorneys at Law (Zurich | Brussels). Her practice focuses on Swiss business law, EU, EEA, and ECHR law, and Swiss-EU bilateral law. As a lawyer admitted to the bar in Switzerland and Belgium, she represents clients in proceedings before Swiss and European authorities and courts.

Laura Melusine has published widely on Swiss, European, and international business law issues and is a regular speaker at conferences around the world. She has been an adjunct lecturer in European competition law at the University of Luxembourg since 2021. From 2014 to 2017, she was a guest lecturer at the University of St. Gallen HSG on “Competition law enforcement by European and Swiss courts”.

The Competition Commission is a militia authority, meaning its members perform their duties on a part-time basis. The purpose of the militia system is to ensure that ComCo’s decision-makers are also active in regular business or legal life in addition to their work in the Commission. Laura Melusine will therefore continue to work as a partner at Nobel Baudenbacher. To avoid conflicts of interest, she has undertaken not to assist or advise on any new competition law mandates during her term of office that could lead to proceedings before the Competition Commission and/or Swiss courts.