Much has been written of the heightened risk of gun-jumping enforcement by competition regulators overseeing mandatory suspensory merger regimes. This article will examine why merger parties and their advisers must also be alive to ‘gun-jumping’ risks in jurisdictions where pre-merger notification is voluntary and there are no automatic standstill obligations. Alongside the succession of ‘gun-jumping’…
There has been an important milestone in the search for more legal certainty in gun-jumping cases: On September 26, 2019, Advocate General (AG) Tanchev issued his opinion in the Marine Harvest case (C-10/18 P) and recommended that the European Court of Justice (CoJ) partially annul Marine Harvest’s gun-jumping fine. Below we take a look at…
Canon, the Japanese imaging and optical products manufacturer, has been fined €28 million (US$ 31.8 million) for implementing its acquisition of Toshiba Medical Systems Corporation (TMSC), before it was approved by the Commission, which is in breach of EU merger control rules. The fine was announced by the European Commission on 27 June 2019. …
After an 18 month investigation involving officials from both the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (“CCPC”) and Ireland’s Director of Public Prosecution, and a first-ever criminal prosecution, a company that gun-jumped Irish merger control rules avoided criminal conviction by agreement to donate €2,000 to charity, following a guilty plea. Irish competition law renders it a…
Gun-jumping is a “hot topic” and increasingly on the radar of competition authorities in Europe and across the globe. As part of the OECD roundtable discussions, the European Union (and a number of other countries) recently submitted a note on the suspensory effects of merger notifications and gun-jumping (Article 7 of the EU Merger Regulation…
At the beginning of August 2018, the Bulgarian Commission for Protection of Competition (“BCPC”) opened proceedings against a local company for non-notification of an acquisition of another undertaking. Such proceedings are very rare, and the last fine for a similar breach in Bulgaria was in 2012. The undertaking acquiring control – Agria Group Holding AD…
Gun-jumping relates to the premature implementation of a transaction prior to obtaining clearance from the relevant competition authorities. It is currently a “hot topic” as enforcement levels across the globe have increased significantly in recent years. In April 2018, the European Commission (EC) imposed a gun-jumping fine of €124.5 million on the multinational cable and…
Speed read On 31 May 2018, the EU’s Court of Justice (ECJ) gave judgment in the EY / KPMG case on whether the EU suspension obligation was violated when KPMG’s Danish unit terminated a material contract prior to receiving competition clearance for its merger with Ernst & Young (EY). The ECJ concluded that the measure…
