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Weinberg, Jeremy --- "Judicial Review of Mergers in Europe: Tetra Laval, GE/Honeywell and the Convergence Toward US Standards" [2006] ELECD 523; in Marsden, Philip (ed), "Handbook of Research in Trans-Atlantic Antitrust" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006)

Book Title: Handbook of Research in Trans-Atlantic Antitrust

Editor(s): Marsden, Philip

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845421816

Section: Chapter 6

Section Title: Judicial Review of Mergers in Europe: Tetra Laval, GE/Honeywell and the Convergence Toward US Standards

Author(s): Weinberg, Jeremy

Number of pages: 42

Extract:

6 Judicial review of mergers in Europe:
Tetra Laval, GE/Honeywell and the
convergence toward US standards
Jeremy Weinberg1


Introduction
More than sixteen years after the European Commission issued its first
formal regulation on merger control, its decisions are now confirmed to be
subject to rigorous and meaningful standards of proof and judicial review.
With its February 2005 final judgment in Commission v. Tetra Laval,2 the
European Court of Justice has clarified muddy precedents and laid out a
strict, clear evidentiary test the Commission and other litigants must meet
in seeking to block or support a merger of two corporate enterprises. More
fundamentally, the judgment marks another shot across the bow of the
European Commission, whose competition regulators were forced to adopt
a more exacting posture after three of their merger decisions were over-
turned by the Court of First Instance in 2002.3 In Tetra Laval, the admo-
nition comes from the Community's highest judicial body, fortifying the
swing away from the Court of First Instance's laxer policing in the early
years of the European single market. In the subsequent GE/Honeywell
judgment,4 laced throughout with references to Tetra Laval, the Court of
First Instance has further driven home the message. Although ultimately
upholding the Commission's decision to block the merger, the Court's
opinion is again critical of much of the Commission's economic reasoning
and factual analysis. Regulators, as well as litigants, have been duly noti-
fied: where the judiciary once was ...