Professional notice
Mexico
Von Wobeser & Sierra boasts an impressive roster of clients – some public and some confidential – for which the firm provides the full scope of antitrust counsel before COFECE and the courts. Fernando Carreño remains at the helm of the two-partner, eight-associate team that also boasts former Mexican Supreme Court justice Guillermo Ortiz Mayagoitia as an adviser.
The firm sits squarely in the midst of many of the investigations COFECE is conducting. Carreño and his team counselled Mexican airline Volaris in COFECE’s investigation into essential inputs and barriers to competition in the allocation of slots at the Mexico City airport. This case, which marked the first time the enforcer ever conducted a market investigation, was closed in June 2017. The firm also advised Anheuser-Busch InBev in an investigation of the Mexican barley market, which COFECE ultimately closed for lack of evidence exposing anticompetitive conditions in the sector. Von Wobeser also advised industrial gases company Infra after COFECE launched an abuse of dominance investigation against it – at the time of writing, the case is in a the trial phase before the commission.
Turning to mergers, Von Wobeser was involved in the ChemChina/Syngenta deal, providing antitrust counsel to Adama, ChemChina’s Israeli subsidiary involved in the market for generic agrochemical products. The firm also counsels Takata in the company’s June 2017 acquisition by Key Safety Systems, a company that was itself bought by Ningbo Joyson in 2016.