Competition law

The ninth entry is a obrigação de compra exclusiva, and English has a flat name for it and an old one. The flat name is « exclusive purchasing », which is what a decision prints. The old one comes out of the beer trade and is still painted on buildings: « a tied house ». A tied house is a pub owned by a brewery, or financed by one, and bound by its lease to take that brewery’s beer and nobody else’s; the pub whose landlord may buy where he likes is « a free house », and that phrase goes on the sign precisely because it promises a wider choice at the bar. The picture is exact and it carries the whole of the clause on this list: the shop is not stopped from trading, it is tied to one supplier. Two cautions for anybody borrowing the idiom. It belongs to the trade and to journalism, never to an authority writing about itself. And « tied » does the work on its own elsewhere — a « tied agent » in financial services is tied to one firm in exactly this sense.