MERGER CONTROL: COMMISSION ADMITS ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT IN MERGER REMEDIES.

Remedies are commitments, given by firms involved in merger decisions, to remove any competition concerns found by the Commission during its investigation of a proposed merger. They often involve the divestiture of certain parts of a business in order to allay fears of market dominance. The Merger Remedies Study compiled by the Commission's Directorate-General for Competition examined the design, implementation and effectiveness of 96 remedies imposed in 40 cases over the five-year period under the EU Merger Regulation.

Although 57% of remedies were "effective", meaning that they "clearly achieved their competition objective", 24% were only partially effective, and 7% were deemed ineffective. This signifies that they "failed to restore competition as foreseen in the Commission's conditional clearance decision". Other findings reveal that the Commission's anticipation of the effect of various remedies was often misguided. For example, as regards access to infrastructure for divested assets, the study discovered that, in three-quarters of all...