The Davies Forecast of Top 5 Trends and Issues for Canadian Competition Law in 2020 Jim Dinning, Anita Banicevic and Mark Katz Here is Davies’ annual forecast of Canadian competition law developments for the year ahead. 1. FOCUS ON THE DIGITAL ECONOMY Given the Competition Bureau’s stated priorities during the tenure of current Commissioner of…

Recent Developments in Canadian Merger Review: Sad Holiday Tidings for Merging Parties Charles Tingley, Anita Banicevic, Mark Katz In his own version of the pre-holiday rush, the Canadian Commissioner of Competition challenged one merger transaction just before the Christmas holidays and entered into a consent agreement to preserve assets pending his review of another. The…

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…

Common ownership currently is one of the focus topics in the antitrust community. Einer Elhauge, a Harvard Law professor, has called it the “greatest anticompetitive threat of our times”. Others believe that there is no issue at all. The below gives an overview on the status of the debate and analyses the recent EU Commission…

On 16 January 2019, the Court of Justice of the European Union (“CJEU” or “Court”) dismissed the European Commission’s appeal against the annulment of its decision to prohibit the acquisition of TNT by UPS. The CJEU stressed the importance of respecting companies’ rights of defence as regards economic analysis and methodology used in merger control….

1. More Deals Receive More Scrutiny Of 98 deals notified, 11 received extended CCPC review (including 4 Phase 2 reviews) – the most extended reviews ever conducted by the CCPC in a single year. While no deal was blocked outright, 5 were cleared conditional on CCPC-approved remedies, including, in one case, a business divestment remedy….

Unlike recent merger cases where the Commission looked at the concentration of data within a merged entity, the Commission’s focus in Apple/Shazam was on vertical concerns, including as a result of access to Shazam customer data.  The focus was more about the potential impact on Apple’s rivals rather than whether the acquisition of data would…

In July this year, the Bulgarian Commission for protection of competition (the “Bulgarian Commission”) blocked the acquisition of the vertically integrated business of CEZ Group of companies (owned by CEZ a.s., Czech Republic) in Bulgaria by Inercom EAD (Bulgaria). The refusal to approve the CEZ/Inercom transaction was discussed in a previous post. In August 2018,…

M&A and other transactions involving foreign companies might sometimes raise national security concerns in specific areas of the economy such as military, dual use, advanced technology, etc. To mitigate those concerns, national governments dealing with a great number of transactions used to establish the strategic investment regimes. In many jurisdictions, strategic investment regime requires either…

The UK’s expected separation from the European Union (EU) on 29 March 2019 (Brexit Date) will re-cast the process by which parties pursuing global mergers secure their antitrust approvals. It will also reshape the potential exposure that parties face when subjected to global investigations of anticompetitive conduct. As Brexit rapidly approaches, businesses increasingly seek guidance…