Barbara Seelos has been appointed to take over the Staff Unit of the Austrian Federal Competition Authority (AFCA) from April, and in her new post will focus specifically on digitalisation, competition monitoring, stakeholder management and strategic internal matters. As a lawyer, Barbara Seelos has vast experience in both a practical and an academic setting. She was with the AFCA for many years, holding the post of Deputy Head of Staff until 2022, and is therefore very familiar with the work carried out at the Authority. During her career she has gained experience at a prestigious corporate law firm in Austria, was seconded to the Court of Justice of the European Union and spent time as a visiting researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. From 2022 until 2025, Barbara Seelos worked for a financial company where she gained valuable knowledge in the field of digitalisation and innovation.
AFCA appoints new Head of Staff Unit and new Deputy Head of Litigation Department
Christoph Winkler has been an important figure at the AFCA since 2023, working as a case handler. His main work areas to date have been centred around the investigation and prosecution of cartel cases in the fields of food/agriculture, as well as unfair trading practices in connection with the sale of agricultural and food products. He was assigned both to the FWBG Unit (Fair Competition Act) and the Litigation Department, additionally acting as Deputy Gender Officer. He holds a law degree from Johannes Kepler University Linz (JKU), where he specialised in corporate law. Following university, he worked as a legal intern in the legal district of the Vienna Higher Regional Court and as legal trainee at an international corporate law firm, and he also took the Austrian bar examination.
