Khan, Kanter In The Spotlight At Berlin Antitrust Conference; And Are US M&A Reviews Too Lax?

MLex Market Insight

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4.9 • 9 Ratings

🗓️ 13 May 2022

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

All eyes were on top US competition regulators Lina Khan and Jonathan Kanter at a recent conference in Berlin, with European officials keen to know how the relatively new heads of the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice’s antitrust division would manage what appears to be a remarkable overhaul in the US’s regulatory landscape. MLex’s Nicholas Hirst was at this year’s ICN conference and was able to cover the comments by the heavy hitters of global antitrust. Also on this week’s podcast: How the FTC and DOJ’s revamp of antitrust reviews is likely to unfold in Washington, amid a growing consensus that past practices have been too lax.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back. It's great to see you again. This is Emlex's weekly podcast covering the top stories in regulatory affairs with the assistance of our team of reporters around the globe.
0:20.6	My name is James Panicki, a senior editor with Emlex's Asia-Pacific operations,
0:25.7	and today we're broadly looking at the one issue, albeit from two very different perspectives.
0:31.7	Our antitrust reporter Nicholas Hurst has returned from the ICN conference in Berlin,
0:36.8	where antitrust regulators have
0:39.0	been talking about the big issues of the moment. Among those big issues attracting attention
0:44.8	are the changes to the antitrust landscape in the United States under the Biden administration.
0:51.3	We've talked about this new direction for the FTC and the DOJ's
0:54.7	antitrust division before on the podcast, but we'll see now how this is percolating through
1:00.4	the system and the degree to which it's reverberating internationally. And we'll also examine
1:06.1	how the changes apply to antitrust reviews. Our reporter Curtis Hekelberger will join us to hammer home one
1:13.9	key message, and that is that there's a perception that the enforcement has become too weak,
1:20.7	and there's an interesting conversation there about the agency's dual roles as regulators
1:25.8	and enforcers. That's in about 10 minutes from now. First up, though,
1:30.9	M-Mex Chief Brussels correspondent Nicholas Hurst is back in Belgium and he joins me now on the line.
1:37.5	So, Nicholas, firstly, tell me something about this conference. What was it all about and what was going on? Okay, these were three
1:46.9	conferences packed into a single week in Berlin. There was a conference organized by the
1:51.9	International Chamber of Commerce. There was a conference organized by Germany's competition
1:56.5	enforcer, the Bundeskartelamps. And then there was a conference strung across a series of days
2:02.6	organised by the International Competition Network. It was Europe's conference jamboree to
2:10.6	counterbalance the American Bar Association's antitrust conference in Washington that took place in April.
2:20.3	And the International Competition Network does feel in some way like a cantal weight to the ABA
	...

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