- Many major European telcos have been urging the region’s lawmakers to relax M&A and competition rules
- They claim that the only way Europe can compete is to allow companies to gain greater national and regional scale
- Now the EC has started a consultation process on its merger guidelines
- But not everyone’s in favour of helping the regions’s big guns get bigger
Under intense lobbying pressure from a wide range of companies (including telcos of course) to revamp the European Union’s mergers and acquisitions (M&A) and antitrust regulations, the European Commission (EC) has launched a public consultation on its merger guidelines that will run until 3 September this year. That means the process will last for just four months, which is lightning speed for EU institutions that, more often than not, grind along at the stately rate of a geriatric tortoise.
The EC says the “review process will focus on how the commission’s assessment should give adequate weight to innovation, efficiency, resilience, the time horizons and investment intensity of competition in certain strategic sectors, sustainability, the changed defence and security environment and other acute transformational needs of our times.”
