Volvo-Scania: mergers and competition policy

Governance, 1999

European Competition Journal, 2011

2013

Merger control during the financial crisis of 2007/2008 is one of the most challenging topics for EU Competition law. The global crisis tested the EU merger control framework in both procedural and substantial aspects. On the one hand, the national governments had an interest (responsibility) to constantly salvage their vulnerable sectors throughout the crisis and did not want to interrupt these measures. On the other hand, such interventions may have led to a serious concentration in the market structure, and in this case, competition law had two significant challenging tasks: firstly, to maintain its existing competition law jurisdiction, and secondly, to cope with the crisis for the Single Market. While discussing the merger control throughout the financial crisis is obviously crucial, a case analysis-based discussion will be more accurate and useful to understand the lessons learned from the crisis. This paper will begin by sketching the overall consequences of the crisis in question, and will continue to further analyse the merger decisions related to enumerated crises. This piece of work is an attempt to cover all the aspects of EU merger control, including jurisdiction, the community dimension, substantive appraisal, remedies, and procedures.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2007

Industrial policy in Europe: theoretical perspectives …, 1999

2006

This study undertakes a comparative analysis of the approaches towards merger control regime taken at the EC and the national levels, namely the Baltic countries. The emergence and further development of competition law and policy (particularly merger control rules) in the unexplored Baltic countries represent a novelty of the work, as there are no comprehensive legal writings in this area. The comparative research revealed that the EC incorporates both a negative and a positive approach vis-a-vis merger control rules; after shifting towards a more economic based approach, the EC regulatory authorities have explicitly recognised possible pro-competitive effects of mergers on competition. Whereas, the situation differs in the Baltic countries: despite committing themselves to applying the EC competition policy, these countries employ a negative approach towards merger transactions by placing focus on finding `dominance' rather than stressing emphasis on a merger's effects on ...

The significantly impediment of effective competition (SIEC) test for merger control was introduced in 2004 in order to allow the European Commission to challenge mergers in differentiated product oligopolies short of dominance, absent a coordinated effect. The record so far shows that no such case has ever occurred. The paper argues that the change of the test was unnecessary and that dominance would have been sufficient to challenge such anticompetitive mergers. On the other hand, the change of the test may well be important for challenging anticompetitive mergers due to coordinated effects (it may no longer be necessary under SIEC to prove that coordinated effects can be challenged only when the coordinating companies behave as a single entity). This paper should be read together with Gregory Werden's " Unilateral competitive effects and the test for merger control " that appears on the same issue of this Journal and which gives a different assessment of the change in the test .

European Business Organization Law Review, 2003

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2000