CMA Senior Director Who Reportedly Blocked ABK Deal Previously Had Ties To Firm Representing Sony

gameranx.com:

When Microsoft announced its bid to acquire Activision Blizzard for an astonishing $69 billion, it was met with plenty of pushback by Sony. The company didn’t want Microsoft to acquire Activision Blizzard and went to several regulators to stop this deal from going through. One of the significant regulators to have blocked this acquisition from happening was the UK’s CMA. That was major news, as it looked like Microsoft had answered all of their concerns going through the review process.

Initially, the concerns were centered around the Call of Duty franchise, as Sony pointed out a variety of areas that would hurt PlayStation. For instance, Sony pointed out that Microsoft would make the game franchise an exclusive, but when that was disproven, they instead focused on how the game version for PlayStation consoles would purposely be made inferior.

While it didn’t look like the CMA was given in to these claims, they eventually struck the deal down because of cloud gaming concerns. But now, new details are coming out that might suggest the block came from an individual with a conflict of interest. 

Thanks to Windows Central, we’re learning that Florian Mueller did a bit more digging into the individuals attached to the CMA. It turns out that the current-serving senior director might have a conflict of interest. Apparently, Colin Raftery was previously attached to Cleary Gottlieb, a law firm that was representing Sony as they fought back against the Activision Blizzard deal.

LinkedIn profile shows: the #CMA's Senior Director, Mergers used to work from 2006 to 2013 for Cleary Gottlieb, the law firm that has been representing #Sony as a complainant over the #Microsoft–#ActivisionBlizzard internationally.He was a key decision