The European Commission has fined Germany’s E.ON AG and it subsidiary €553m each and on France’s GDF Suez SA for sharing markets. The parties had agreed in 1975, when they decided to jointly build the MEGAL pipeline to import Russian gas into Germany and France, that they would not sell gas transported over this pipeline in each other’s home markets. They maintained the market-sharing agreement after European gas markets were liberalized, and only abandoned it definitively in 2005. These are the first Commission antitrust fines involving energy.