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.
New vertical merger test
In vertical mergers, antitrust agencies often focus on the merging firms’ incentives to foreclose inputs to rivals when analyzing competitive effects. Less...