8 April 2011 — We have received a mountain of emails asking about the competing NYSE Euronext deals so we thought we’d provide a summary. Deutsche Boerse made the first offer.  Under that deal Deutsche Boerse shareholders are set to own 60 percent of the combined company with NYSE Euronext shareholders taking a 40 percent [...]

Reported by:  Gregory P. Bufithis, Esq. (with special thanks to Johann Jurgens who is a telecom analyst for a hedge fund and is an advisor to The Posse List on the telecom industry)  21 March 2011 — Late yesterday AT&T and Deutsche Telekom announced an agreement for the sale of T-Mobile USA for $39 billion in cash and [...]

  3 May 2010 — United Air Lines and Continental Airlines announced their merger today.  It will create the world’s largest airline by traffic.  Delta Air Lines would be unseated as the world’s largest airline.  And depending on who you listen to the deal will have little trouble securing approval from the DOJ — or take [...]

Reported by:  Gregory Bufithis and Alex Hania Weil, Gotshal and Covington & Burling will provide antitrust counsel to Exxon, and handle the second request.   Covington has long been Exxon’s go-to antitrust counsel, and the firm guided Exxon through the antitrust process after its acquisition of Mobil.   Both firms indicated the deal will likely win antitrust approval even though the [...]

                           As heavily reported in the media, Comcast reached an agreement on Thursday with General Electric Company to acquire NBC Universal.  The deal will under go heavy regulatory scrutiny and there is a lot of analysis already on the various media and legal blogs.  If you have a Twitter account and do a simple [...]

  30 November 2009 For plants designed in a lab a little more than a decade ago, they’ve come a long way:  Today, the vast majority of the nation’s two primary crops grow from seeds genetically altered according to Monsanto company patents.  Ninety-three percent of soybeans. Eighty percent of corn. The seeds represent “probably the most [...]

                                        23 September 2009 The Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission announced on Tuesday that they will explore updating their horizontal merger guidelines, the first such change in 17 years. Christine Varney, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, said the government would hold a series of public workshops to [...]

A few weeks ago we posted the news that the DOJ had launched an antitrust investigation into how dealers provide credit derivatives prices (see our previous post by clicking here). Two recent articles in the Financial Times indicates it opens a tussle between regulators and Wall Street.   As one article states “in a week when Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan released turbo-charged [...]

                 The DOJ confirmed yesterday that its Antitrust Division is investigating possible anti-competitive practices involving credit derivatives.  The statement read:  “The Antitrust Division is investigating the possibility of anti-competitive practices in the credit derivatives clearing, trading and information services industries.” The statement came the day after Markit Ltd, a dealer-owned provider of prices in the [...]

The Canadian Competition Bureau issued its proposed revised merger enforcement guidelines (MEGs) in March 2009.  They were last revised September 2004 which was the first update since their original publication in March 1991. The MEGs exhibit greater convergence with US merger enforcement policy, while retaining some distinctly Canadian policy choices reflective of the provisions of the Canadian [...]