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 [...]

8 September 2010 — Being the 800-pound gorilla in the search-engine space … and seemingly everything else internet related … Google is probably at the top of the list of most government regulators all over the world.  As well as anybody competing against Google.  And as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times have [...]

  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 [...]

  As reported today in Corporate Counsel magazine, anti-corruption enforcement is bulking up (click here for article).    Mark Mendelsohn, deputy chief of the DOJ fraud section’s criminal division, said his section “may grow as much as 50 percent in size in the next year or two.”  At the same time, he added, he expects companies to [...]

   15 November 2009 The presentation was made by David Shonka (Principal Deputy General Counsel of the Federal Trade Commission), Miriam Smolen (associate general counsel in Fannie Mae’s litigation department, and in this role she manages complex commercial litigations and government investigations) and moderated by Andrew Goldsmith (First Assistant Chief in the Department of Justice). [...]

The recap of the first four of the six formal presentations we covered you can find by clicking here. In this Part 2 we cover:  the personal liabilty of a general counsel; DOJ/SEC enforcement efforts in 2009 1.  Don’t Prosecute the General Counsel The panel consisted of Peter Anderson (partner at Sutherland Asbill & Brennan), Kirk Forrest (Vice President, General Counsel & [...]

                                        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 [...]

July 27, 2009 Microsoft said on said Friday it will offer European consumers a choice of Web browsers with Windows in an effort to settle an antitrust probe by the European Union. The software giant has been accused of using its dominance to unfairly push its own browser, Internet Explorer, on consumers by tying it [...]

                 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 [...]