Recent Developments in EU Merger Remedies (2018)

摘要

The last full calendar year of Margrethe Vestager s first term as Competition Commissioner further strengthened her reputation as a bold, demanding enforcer. The Commission's intervention rate in 2018 remained high at 7 per cent (and reached an 'all-time-high' in absolute number of interventions) compared to an average of 3.9 per cent under her predecessor Joaquin Almunia. While the Commission did not formally block any merger last year, in two cases, the merging parties withdrew their notifications in the face of opposition {Celanese/Blackstone/JV; Aperam/VDM). The Commission also maintained the rigorous approach towards remedy design and implementation that has come to characterise Commissioner Vestager's tenure, while showing increasing readiness to take on board insights from novel economic theories. Four trends were particularly noteworthy in 2018.