Features

Baker & Miller co-founder Donald Baker recently teamed up with Antitrust Division attorney Mark Niefer in an article to mark the 50th anniversary of the International Telephone & Telegraph affair, which saw Congress pass the Tunney Act in 1974 after a columnist accused the Department of Justice of settling three cases against ITT in exchange for a $400,000 contribution towards the re-election of President Richard Nixon. GCR spoke to Baker – then an Antitrust Division staffer, but later the head of the agency – about political interference in antitrust enforcement and the parallels with today’s enforcers.

26 May 2023

The UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal has put the brakes on the Competition and Markets Authority’s hopes of compelling information requests from companies with no territorial connection to the UK. White & Case partners James Killick and Marc Israel consider the options for companies now faced with information requests and ponder if the tribunal’s ruling will have any limiting effect on an increasingly proactive antitrust enforcer.

19 May 2023

Three members of The Law Society’s competition section are spearheading a push for greater ethnic diversity in the UK’s antitrust bar, recently organising a roundtable in partnership with the Competition and Markets Authority to discuss, promote and move forward the issue. In a conversation with GCR, Baker McKenzie partner Keith Jones, Ropes & Gray partner Ruchit Patel and Morgan Lewis & Bockius partner Omah Shah recap that meeting and explain how they – and the CMA – plan to go about achieving their mission.

12 May 2023

The row between Brussels and Washington over green energy funding shows how even desirable subsidies can have undesirable effects. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development senior policy analyst Ruben Maximiano and competition expert Wouter Meester examine the role competition authorities have in tackling distortive subsidies through merger and antitrust enforcement.

12 May 2023

Columbia University professor Paola Valenti, the former chief economist at the New York attorney general’s office, has argued in recent articles that a lack of female economists is hurting the quality of antitrust analysis. GCR USA spoke with Valenti about why enforcers, private practitioners and academics should seek to narrow the gap.

21 April 2023

The Hart-Scott-Rodino Act disproportionately permits private-equity-backed mergers to go unreported compared to those funded by public equity, according to a study published last month by Washington University professor John Manuel Barrios, University of Chicago professor Thomas Wollmann and Yale doctoral student Aslihan Asil. GCR USA spoke with Asil about potential concerns from transactions that the US antitrust agencies might not know exist.

13 April 2023

Rod Sims is a recipient of GCR’s 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award. During his acceptance speech in Washington, DC, on 28 March, the former head of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission warned that insufficient antitrust enforcement threatens democracy, and urged the competition bar to query if their work is leading to the right outcomes.

06 April 2023

The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change last month published a report slamming the UK’s foreign investment regime for putting the country’s national security at risk. Jeeger Kakkad, the report's author and director of the Future of Britain initiative at the institute, spoke to GCR about how the National Security and Investment Act poses a threat to security, how the regime can be more transparent and the urgent need for government guidance.

06 April 2023

Nearly a year into his role as chief economist at the Netherlands’ Authority for Consumers and Markets, Paul de Bijl talked to GCR about measuring the harm caused to competition by political lobbying, the role his team played in the agency’s high-profile Apple case and whether the enforcer is overstepping its mandate with its sustainability work.

27 March 2023

A year after being appointed chair of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, Gina Cass-Gottlieb spoke with GCR about upcoming merger control reforms, deciding which sectors need targeted regulation or antitrust enforcement, and the impact of criminal enforcement on a recent uptick in leniency applications.

17 March 2023