Hello, welcome to another podcast from Emlex associated with our best of series of articles

showcasing our best writing and reporting from 2016.

My name is James Panicki.

I'm the Brussels managing editor here at Emlex.

And today we're reviewing a fine piece of writing by two members of our Brussels antitrust team.

Lewis Crofts is our chief correspondent on competition. Matthew Newman

is senior correspondent for antitrust and merger regulation. That's a whole lot of seniority

squeezed into one very small room. Hello, Matthew and Lewis. Hello. Hello. Now, the comment piece

we're talking about today focused on Margreta Vesteyer, the EU's competition commissioner, and

I enjoy this piece because you're able to delve into the personal a little more than we

usually get to do here at MNX. The thesis of the article is this in everything Vesteyer does.

In all of her decisions, the decisions that she has to make on a day-to-day basis, her worldview comes to the

fore, and it's a worldview which revolves around the notion of fairness. Now, Matthew, what are we

talking when we say fairness in this context? We're talking about her overarching view of fairness

in her background. If you look at her background of being the daughter of two pastors,

Lutheran pastors, she made these comments in a speech, and the speech was in the context of

celebrating Martin Luther. And what we found interesting about it is that there's been a lot of discussion about

what competition policy means overall in politics.

Is it too political? Is it not political enough?

And she's clearly come down on the side that fairness for her means that companies must behave in a fair

way and that could be with taxation so she's had the big cases against multination

that could be with cartels where you know obviously it's, or it could be with antitrust like Google,

...