CELS 'Brown Bag' Research Lunch: 'The role of social factors and efficiencies in EU merger control'

CELS is pleased to invite you to 'brown bag’ research lunch on Thursday 2 June 2011, 1-2pm in room B16.

Paul Hughes MA (Oxon) LLM (Essex) PhD (Cantab) Senior Academic University of Westminster, Visiting Fellow University of Essex and European Competition Counsel, Steptoe & Johnson LLP Brussels will present his work on: "The role of social factors and efficiencies in EU merger control".

The talk will address the issue of whether the Court of Justice and the European Commission should adopt judicial and administrative approaches respectively which are more favourable to an assessment of merger efficiencies. It will consider social factors in the context of merger efficiencies, in particular in the light of the Commission’s Decision in Ryanair/Aer Lingus (Case COMP/M.4439), the General Court’s judgment on Ryanair’s appeal from that decision (Case T-342/07 Ryanair v Commission) and the Decision in Microsoft/Yahoo! Search Business (Case COMP/M.5727). It will consider the evidence relating to post-merger corporate performance and question whether existing Commission merger procedures are adequate to test for important, but hard to quantify, efficiencies. This analysis will be conducted in the light of the provisions of the EC Merger Regulation and against the background of both the general aims of EU law and of EU competition law more generally.

Please RSVP to Felicity Eves-Rey (fre20@cam.ac.uk) and Markus Gehring (mwg24@cam.ac.uk).