Bernard Goyder, John Hewitt Jones and Laura Board
...a failure by one of the parties to provide information requested by the commission, the EC has confirmed.
Sources have emphasised that such pauses are a routine part of the Phase II review process, with few EC anti-trust reviews completing in a consecutive 90-day window.
“It’s not at all unusual for the clock to be stopped in a Phase II, the parties will have wanted to avoid this,” one anti-trust lawyer told this publication.
"This procedure in merger investigations is activated if the parties fail to provide, in a timely fashion, an important piece of information that the Commission has requested from them," a spokeswoman for the EC competition authority told Reuters on Tuesday.
Timothy McIver, a Debevoise partner who leads the firm’s European Competition team, pointed to an impending deadline in the Australian review into the deal as a possible distraction for the broking giants’ merger teams.
“The deadline for the Australian ACCC decision is coming up shortly, so that could be a factor if people are busy with that,” McIver said.
Aon has targeted the end of H1 to complete its merger with Willis, so it can afford a brief pause in the process.
It is understood that the delay will have no material impact on Aon’s chances of its marquee merger surviving the EC review unscathed.
McIver said that the EC has been increasingly stopping the clock when the parties fail to provide requested information by the deadline, but that such pauses are normally introduced by mutual agreement between the regulator and the merger parties.
“The Commission has for some time now been increasingly ‘stopping the clock’ where the parties either cannot respond to an informal information request by the deadline or provide incomplete information,” he noted.
“Ideally and normally that is done by mutual agreement when all sides recognise the request is simply going to take a while to address.”
Last year, the EC’s probe into a $1.8bn merger between the world’s largest shipbuilding company Hyundai Heavy Industries and Daewoo was delayed on multiple occasions because of challenges collecting data requested by the anti-trust regulator, due to Covid-19.
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