Ben Forbes
Director, London
As part of the expert analysis for Global Legal Insights Merger Control 2021, AlixPartners' Ben Forbes, Mat Hughes, and Camelia O’Brien have co-authored a chapter on Assessing the Loss of Potential and Dynamic Competition under UK and EC Merger Control: Prediction is Difficult – Especially if it’s about the Future. The chapter considers recent developments in how competition authorities are assessing mergers that may lead to a loss of potential or dynamic competition. They discuss why such mergers may be anti-competitive, the consequential policy implications, and the evidence required to assess specific merger. These principles are also considered by references to three cases where the CMA and EC assessed potential / dynamic competition in detail, namely Bauer Media (2020), Amazon/Deliveroo (2020) and Novartis/GlaxoSmithKline Oncology (2015).
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