Hello, welcome to this MLEX podcast. You'll have noticed that we've been off the air for a while,

but we're back now with a weekly podcast, which we plan to drop into your feed on Friday morning GMT.

I'm James Panicki from Emlex's Asia-Pacific team and I'll be your host and every week

we'll be chatting with Emlex journalists around the world about the biggest stories of the week.

And for more of the very best of Emlex's writing, head straight for mlexmarketingSight.com and

click on the Insight Center tab.

Now, you don't need me to tell you that the COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked regulatory havoc across

the globe, as the agency is responsible for reviewing mergers and acquisitions face problems

on two fronts.

Firstly, there are the technical obstacles. Officials working from home may struggle to gain access to the material they need to do

their job. Merging companies and interested parties may also struggle to provide regulators with

information. But then there's the coronavirus's impact on the markets. How can you assess whether

a deal would reduce competition in a market that no longer exists because it has been caught up

in the lockdown? Joining me today from Rome is Flavia Forte, Semlex's Global Head of Mergers,

and Natalie McNellis, our mergers correspondent in Brussels.

Flavia, first off, how are things going for merger control in the US at the moment?

In the US, the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice are doing their best to cope with

the new normal, which has most of the staff working remotely. There's an electronic system in place that has been accepting

filings on a regular basis, but the notifications are down 60% in this first quarter. The beginning,

they also had suspended the early termination of the deadline for murder reviews, but they have

already been restored. It's definitely an unprecedented

situation, though, and that has slow companies' responses to document requests, and also

...