EU Decision, Sony COD Contract Made CMA Review The MS Activision Deal
The CMA has shared a new document explaining their logic behind their review of the Microsoft Activision deal.
As you may remember, the CMA and the Microsoft made a request to the Competition Appeal Tribunal to stop the appeals process on the CMA’s original decision, to block the merger.
Microsoft had already explained they were confident that they would win in appeals court. Their decision to not go through with it is to smooth things over with the CMA. We understand Microsoft’s choices and why they decided to go this route, but we hadn’t heard CMA’s side of it, until now.
As explained by Florian Mueller on Twitter (edited for clarity):
“The @CATribunal (Competitions Appeal Tribunal just released a public redacted version of testimony by the @CMAgovUK’s (Competition and Markets Authority) Interim General Counsel regarding the joint motion to stay the UK appeal.
It confirms what was in a recent media report: the CMA’s goal is to publish new provisional views this week. Thereafter, there’ll be another 7-day comment period.
Under oath, the official confirms that the FTC’s failure in court was not key to the request for a stay.
That said, important developments from the U.S. court proceedings may be taken into consideration now. That was the 3rd part of Microsoft’s most recent submission.”
The CMA’s Interim General Counsel is Chris Prevett, and he is the author of this testimony. We’ll also quote from the document to explain what the CMA’s position is.
Microsoft argued that there was a “material change of circumstance or special reason” on July 26, 2023. That was the date when the FTC lost their federal case to block the deal. Now, as Florian explained above, that wasn’t the reason the CMA agreed to review the deal. But,
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