The White Paper proposes that a company would have to notify the Commission if it is planning to take over a minority shareholding which could significantly affect competition.<\/p>\n
It would have to provide data such as the companies\u2019 turnover, a description of the transaction, the level of shareholding and some market information.<\/p>\n
The Commission considers that this \u2018targeted transparency system\u2019 would not add unnecessary administrative burdens on companies, but would give it sufficient details to decide whether to investigate the merger further.<\/p>\n
The proposed changes to the referral of mergers from national authorities to the Commission are designed to make the system faster and more effective.<\/p>\n
The White Paper advocates that the companies involved inform the Commission directly, without the case first going through a national competition body (the current procedure). The national competition body would be informed of the proposed merger and could decide to review it itself. If it does not – and national authorities rarely veto such requests – the Commission will examine the case itself.<\/p>\n
The EU\u2019s merger legislation last had a major overhaul in 2004. It provides a harmonised set of rules for concentrations and corporate restructuring. This ensures that competition, and thus consumers, are not harmed by changes in the marketplace.<\/p>\n
The Commission has only prohibited 24 mergers since 1990 and just six since 2004 – significantly less than 1 % of over 5 000 mergers notified.<\/p>\n\n
\n <\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Guidelines on the assessment of horizontal mergers under the EU regulation on the control of concentrations between undertakings They provide guidance as to the European Commission\u2019s approach when assessing the likely impact of mergers, within the scope of Article 2 of Regulation (EC) No 139\/2004 (the Merger Regulation), where the firms concerned are actual or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[125,157],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12324"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12324"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12324\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20563,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12324\/revisions\/20563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12324"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12324"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/legalblog.ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12324"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}