CRA consultants advised parties to the Ladbrokes and Gala Coral Group merger. The merger was previously blocked when it was attempted in 1998. The Competition and Markets Authority accepted that online gambling was a significant and growing constraint and cleared the merger, subject to the sale of 350 to 400 licensed betting offices to preserve competition in local markets where the betting products of the two firms overlapped. The CRA team was led by Matthew Bennett and included Vicki Mertzanidou, Sam Brown, and Angelos Stenimachitis.
Pivotality: A sound new theory of harm in horizontal mergers?
In its review of the Novelist/Aleris merger, the European Commission relied upon a novel pivotality theory of harm, where pivotality indicates that competitors...