Hello, welcome to Emlex's podcast. My name is James Panicki. I'm a senior editor here at Emlex,

and every week we cover the top regulatory stories from around the world.

Today we'll kick things off by passing the recent joint statement on mergers and acquisitions by three of the world's most high profile and active regulators.

It's a discussion in part at least linked to the divisions in regulatory responses

to Google's ambitious acquisition of smartwatch

maker Fitbit. It's been a while since a deal has highlighted such clear divisions in approach

among regulators, and we'll get to that in just a moment. Then, ah, yes, it wouldn't be an end-of-week

podcast without at least some discussion of sport and the debacle

that was the announcement of a Super League taking in the top European soccer or football teams.

The move has already collapsed, but the rise and fall of the rebellion ticked a number of antitrust

boxes along the way, and Lewis Crofts will give us the lowdown from Brussels

in just under 10 minutes time. First up, though, the joint statement by the antitrust regulators

of Australia, Germany and the UK this week was, to a large extent, a PR move. All of these regulators

feel that they need sharper tools to manage mergers and acquisitions

with particular regard to fast-moving digital markets and they wanted the world to know

Victoria Ibitoye is a senior correspondent with Emnex and she reports on M&A from London and she's

with us now okay Victoria let's start with this joint statement. What does it say?

Yeah, so the joint statement essentially calls for rigorous and effective merger enforcement.

It's a brainchild of the UK's Competition and Markers Authority, Germany's Bundes,

Gartlandt and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.

And what it does is essentially reaffirm the need for merger control to stay tough.

There is nothing drastically new in the statement, all surprising.

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