Competition, Trade and Foreign Investment

Our global team is experienced in all aspects of competition and international trade law. Representative experience includes advising:

• one of the manufacturers in the European Commission’s investigation into the truck sector, one of the largest EU cartel investigations conducted to date. We attended the Commission’s dawn raid, led the response to their information requests and handled the client’s internal investigations across Europe throughout the five-year investigation. We helped the client secure the first-ever post-Statement of Objections settlement with the Commission, reducing the client’s fine by EUR 700 million
• six agri-commodity clients in respect of a joint venture which creates a global digital platform for post-trade settlement services in the agri-commodity sector, powered by blockchain. This was a global transaction, and we managed multi-jurisdictional filings, providing a seamless service to the team of GCs involved from each party
• an American corporation specializing in motion and control technologies on the UK and European antitrust aspects of its $4.3 billion purchase of a US manufacturer of filtration systems. We conducted a multijurisdictional merger control analysis across 57 countries and secured clearances in multiple jurisdictions, despite the parties having extremely high market shares on narrow market segmentations
• a major airline in its dealing with significant platform providers for the sale of seats and working in particular on the current terms of the agreements with those platform providers including “MFN” clauses and the enforceability of those provisions under competition law in 260 jurisdictions around the world
• a number of claimants in multi-million pound competition damages claims against MasterCard and Visa in relation to interchange fees charged to retailers for accepting credit and debit card payments