Private equity investments
FTC's merger remedies study
A CFIUS Roundup: Polaris Financial
A significant milestone was reached this week in the Justice Department’s antitrust litigation against Google regarding its internet search business. U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta issued a 230-page ruling on remedies...more
Since China’s Anti-Monopoly Law (AML) was implemented in 2008, the nation has reviewed over 6,000 concentrations. While most were cleared unconditionally and conditional decisions primarily involved behavioral remedies, an...more
The FTC and DOJ under President Trump have each recently approved divestiture remedies for potentially anticompetitive mergers, signaling a significant departure from the practice of the Biden administration, which viewed...more
The Trump administration’s recently announced settlements resolving the antitrust concerns in transactions mark a shift from the previous administration’s hostile rhetoric against settlements and remedies in merger cases. As...more
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the US Department of Justice (DOJ) each recently announced that they would accept structural remedies to address concerns that two transactions in the technology industry would reduce...more
The current leadership of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice (Antitrust Division or DOJ) (collectively, “antitrust agencies”) have signaled an intention to reject the...more
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has agreed to accept the new administration's first settlement of a merger-enforcement challenge. The settlement includes the divestiture of three businesses and will allow Synopsys, Inc. to...more
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC or Commission) recently announced that it will require Synopsys, Inc. (Synopsys) and Ansys, Inc. (Ansys) (together, “the parties”) to divest certain assets to resolve antitrust concerns...more
The year 2023 will be remembered as a challenging one for private equity (PE), with complexities to navigate on many fronts. Traditional debt financing was expensive and scarce, expectations on valuations were tricky to...more
The Biden Administration's aggressive antitrust enforcers have trained their sights on private equity companies. They have signaled through enforcement activities, formal policy statements and informal interviews and speeches...more
In 2021, President Biden issued an Executive Order directing antitrust enforcers to make sure that health care would be an area of emphasis for antitrust enforcement, and in 2022 they did. Federal regulators brought several...more
Takeaways - With increasingly aggressive antitrust and foreign investment reviews, directors need to be fully informed about the risks of deals from the beginning of negotiations. Boards should insist that management and its...more
Earlier this year, Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, who leads the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division, announced that the Antitrust Division would eschew settlements in merger challenges in...more
Despite the aggressive rhetoric, the change in the leadership and composition at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) did not result in more enforcement in 2021. As the calendar turned to 2022, the FTC seems to be stepping...more
Antitrust scrutiny of M&A remained high during 2021, and merging parties continued to make follow-on divestitures designed to obtain antitrust clearance for their main transaction....more
In an extraordinary, perhaps unprecedented, action, parties to a proposed deal that had been under investigation for about nine months closed the transaction almost immediately upon expiration of the Hart-Scott-Rodino (“HSR”)...more
The Remedy of Divestiture: Steves and Sons, Inc. v. JELD-WEN, Inc. For what is believed to be the first time ever, a private plaintiff successfully challenged an already consummated merger under antitrust law and won...more
What happened? On September 3, 2020, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) issued a revised Merger Remedies Manual, which sets forth the Division’s framework for implementing remedies to resolve antitrust concerns in merger...more
The FTC published its views on divestiture packages used to obtain clearance under the HSR Act. According to the FTC: “Before putting pen to paper, parties should discuss with Bureau staff what assets, rights, and...more
On March 11, 2019, the Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s (“FTC’s”) Bureau of Competition and the Assistant Director of the Bureau’s Compliance Division coauthored a blog post to announce the revision of “standard...more
The German Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt or "FCO") has published guidance on the requirements placed on remedies in merger control and their implementation. Remedies are an important instrument in merger control...more
On 3 February 2017, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released its Merger Remedies Study, which analyzed the success of merger remedies imposed by the FTC from 2006 to 2012. Nearly two decades after it issued a similar...more
In a rare appellate opinion addressing the merits of a merger challenge, the Ninth Circuit last month sided with the Federal Trade Commission, finding that a 2012 merger of two health care providers in Idaho was likely to...more
On February 10, 2015, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (which covers Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada, Alaska, Hawaii and Arizona) ordered St. Luke’s Health System, Ltd. (“St....more
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed an Idaho federal district court’s decision ordering the divestiture of a physician practice group that had been acquired by a competing health system. The case, which...more