Europe’s Top Court on Merger Review: No Deals Are ‘Off the Table’

The European Union’s top court recently confirmed that an M&A transaction that does not require mandatory pre-merger authorization may be investigated post-merger on suspicion that the transaction involved an ‘abuse’ of the acquirer’s ‘dominant position’. Per the ruling in the Towercast case, pre-merger authorization under the EU Merger Regulation (or EU member state equivalents) is required for certain specified transactions, but the rules on merger review do not exclude the applicability of the general antitrust prohibitions in Article 101 (restrictive agreements) and Article 102 (abuse of dominance) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and EU member state equivalents.

To learn more, please see this recent Cooley Alert