Private equity investments
FTC's merger remedies study
A CFIUS Roundup: Polaris Financial
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
For companies in the energy and chemical sectors, the potential for antitrust scrutiny is an ever-present concern. The next round of enforcement inquiries is never further away than the next jump in commodity prices or the...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
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
PE investors stand ready to fund spinoffs of non-core assets as companies refocus for the recovery - Last spring, Dell spun off its cloud computing business, VMWare, in a deal valued at nearly US$63 billion, with the equity...more
On February 18, 2021, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit upheld the divestiture order issued by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in a private merger challenge brought by...more
Divestiture has long been considered an appropriate and effective remedy for anticompetitive horizontal mergers. The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”), as reflected in the Statement of the Bureau of Competition entitled...more
On September 3, 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division released a revised Merger Remedies Manual. This revised manual is the culmination of a review by the Antitrust Division of its entire approach to...more
On September 3, 2020, the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division (the DOJ) issued its new Merger Remedies Manual (the Manual), which provides the framework the DOJ will utilize going forward to implement relief in mergers...more
The U.S. Department of Justice's ("DOJ") new remedies guide reinforces its strong preferences for structural divestitures and upfront buyers to resolve merger investigations. Last week, the DOJ released a new "Merger...more
The United States Department of Justice released its revised Merger Remedies Manual on September 3, 2020, providing “Antitrust Division attorneys and economists with a framework for fashioning and implementing appropriate...more
On September 3, 2020, the DOJ’s Antitrust Division released its Merger Remedies Manual. The manual provides important guidance on what DOJ considers to be adequate solutions to addressing competitive issues in M&A deals...more
Discover the factors that drove healthcare M&A activity in 2019. Innovation, expansion and continued private equity investment in the industry influenced healthcare transactions last year. 2019 saw continued robust...more
Driven by the influence of shareholders, activists and competitive market forces, public companies are demonstrating renewed focus on their core businesses. Reductions in the U.S. corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% have...more
In the last five years, the European Commission (EC) has required divestitures in more than 70 antitrust cases, requiring merging parties to divest business assets as a condition to receiving regulatory approval. This...more
The American Bar Association’s 65th Antitrust Law Spring Meeting held at the end of March included a number of sessions with representatives from federal and state antitrust enforcement agencies. In the first article in a...more