Carey

Chile

Partners Claudio Lizana and Lorena Pavic continue to co-head the competition practice at CAREY. The pair now spearhead a team of 21 attorneys and one economist, making it the country’s largest antitrust practice.

In merger work, the firm is guiding eyewear company EssilorLuxottica on its proposed €7.1 billion acquisition of global eyecare retailer GrandVision. In May 2020, the National Economic Prosecutor (FNE) announced that it was opening a Phase II review into the deal after concluding that the companies’ proposed remedies did not address its preliminary competition concerns. The authority did not release details of the proposed remedies but said the deal raises both horizontal and vertical competition concerns. Carey’s antitrust team also advised IBM on its €30 billion purchase of technology software of Red Hat, which closed in July 2019.

Behavioural work includes acting for pharmaceutical companies Fresenius Kabi Chile and Laboratorio Sanderson before the Supreme Court, appealing against a complaint filed by the country’s competition watchdog. The FNE has accused the company of colluding on multiple bids from 1999 to 2013 on certain generic drugs for Cenabast – a Chilean public institution that centralises medical product purchases for the public sector. The firm also acted for multinational retail company Cencosud before the Supreme Court in challenging the country’s first hub-and-spoke cartel case in 2019. The FNE accused Cencosud of participating in a cartel with supermarket chains Walmart Chile and SMU to fix the price of chicken meat. In April 2020, the Supreme Court nearly doubled the fines issued against the companies by the Tribunal for Defence of Free Competition (TDLC).