Submission to French Competition Authority on below-threshold mergers

On 15 February 2025, together with a group of civil society organisations collaborating on a Digital Merger Watch initiative, we submitted a response to the French Competition Authority’s public consultation on introducing a new merger review framework to capture below-threshold mergers.

We called for the introduction of call-in powers for the French Competition Authority to ensure it has effective tools to deal with potentially harmful national or European mergers that would otherwise escape scrutiny. This is necessary to close an enforcement gap and deal with so-called “killer acquisitions” whereby large and/or dominant companies exploit loopholes to evade merger control thresholds to acquire small companies with significant potential and market impact, thereby eliminating potential competitors, stifling promising innovation and entrenching market power, particularly in the tech and life sciences markets. This is a pressing concern across the EU following a European Court of Justice ruling in September 2024 that closed down a powerful component of the European Commission’s merger review toolkit aimed at capturing killer acquisitions effecting the EU market.

It is therefore especially important that governments in France and other national jurisdictions in the EU take additional action to ensure that their national competition authorities capture potentially problematic transactions within their national merger control regime including adopting and making use of call-in powers. Killer acquisitions are a competitive threat to markets and competition 

They pose a competitive threat to markets and need to be tackled. 

You can find our submission here.