The long-awaited European Court of Justice’s judgment in Towercast confirmed that national competition authorities (and national courts) can apply abuse of dominance rules to mergers that did not trigger EU and national merger control thresholds and were not referred to the European Commission under Article 22 of the EU Merger Regulation. However, uncertainties still remain….

Are big companies necessarily bad? If they are, how can we ensure that companies do not become too big and too bad? How can markets remain free, fair and competitive? Competition law has tried to answer these questions for centuries, with the most recent debates revolving around the alleged anti-competitive conduct of large tech companies….

In its judgement on 17 February 2023, Norway’s Supreme Court quashed the Norwegian Competition Authority’s prohibition of the 2019 acquisition of tech start-up Nettbil by media conglomerate Schibsted. This is the very first merger case heard by the Norwegian courts and represents an important development in Norwegian merger control.   Prohibition of a Below-Threshold Transaction…

The European Union’s (EU’s) new Foreign Subsidies Regulation (FSR), entered into force on January 12, 2023.  The FSR creates a unique new quasi-antitrust regime to combat distortions of competition in the EU internal market caused by subsidies multinationals receive outside the EU.  It imposes new mandatory notification and approval requirements for acquisitions of significant EU…

In Turkey, a Phase II review takes 228 days on average, almost eight months from the day of merger notification. Although the Turkish Competition Authority (“TCA”) has prohibited only five proposed transactions during its 25-year tenure, both behavioural (11 cases) and structural remedies (15 cases) were imposed. The TCA conducted merger simulations in four cases,…

General considerations During 2022 there have been no changes regarding the competition law since it was last enacted in 2018. The bill approved by the Senate in February 2021 amending certain aspects of the law, was not discussed at the House of Deputies during 2022 and is expected to lose parliamentary status in February 2023….

The level of enforcement of competition law in Slovakia in 2022 was noticeably lower compared to previous years. Outside merger control, where the Slovak Antimonopoly Office’s (AMO) activity is less influenced by its leadership, the AMO was rather inactive. It issued no relevant decisions in the area of restrictive agreements and carried out only a…

When, why, and on what evidence can a competition regulator in one jurisdiction push for divestments in global deals? An increasingly active UK Competition and Markets Authority (“CMA”) has been making its presence known, not least in technology mergers. This blog post will review core questions from Meta/Giphy relevant to advising on UK merger clearance…