Australia: Legal experts say ACCC’s strong approach to mergers won’t work

According to The Australian, legal experts have recently warned that the competition watchdog’s move to toughen up its approach to contentious mergers is likely to fail to deliver its desired result.

On Friday Rod Sims announced that his team would now apply a new intensive information-gathering approach to mergers considered contentious. The move will require companies to produce extra documentation. Mr Sims said the new approach was in response to several cases in the Australian Competition Tribunal and the Federal Court in which contentious mergers had been allowed to proceed.

Michael Corrigan, partner at Clayton Utz, said the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) was clearly unhappy with the cases it had lost in the tribunal process and had made this move in an attempt to “reverse their track ­record”.

“I don’t think anyone was expecting this response — that they feel they need to get hold of more material, more evidence and take more time as a way of addressing that concern,” he said.

“I don’t think that there is a gap in the evidence that the commission has got its hands on. The tribunal has just not accepted the ACCC’s particular concern, and come to a different view. It’s not that there was a lack of evidence being a problem. I don’t think this change is likely to really change anything.”

Full Content: The Australian

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