Hello, it's great to be with you again.

This is Emlex's podcast, ready to recap another crazy busy week in regulatory affairs with

help from our team of reporters around the globe.

My name is James Panicki. I'm Emlex's Asia Pacific Senior Editor. And where to start this week?

Well, you don't have to be an MLEX subscriber to know that Illumina's $8 billion

US dollar takeover of cancer testing company Grail has gone through an interesting process of late.

It's not so much the European Commission's review of the deal,

although that is still unfolding and it may yet have some drama in store for us.

What's more important is an EU court's ruling on whether the European Commission

indeed even has the right to vet the acquisition.

Natalie McNeilis will walk us through the ins and outs of that decision in just over 10 minutes from now,

and there is so much to discuss.

First up, though, to the US, and yes, it's time to throw some chicken into the regulatory frying pan

because five chicken industry executives have been acquitted in a criminal price fixing trial this month.

It wasn't the first time they'd face prosecution, courtesy of the Department of Justice, and it wasn't the first time that they had prevailed.

So what does the DOJ's defeat say about Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Cantor's campaign to get tough on antitrust violations?

Our coverage of this case came to you courtesy of Mike Acton in San Francisco and Cushita Vassant in Washington, D.C.

And they are with us now, both in spirit and in person.

Now, Mike, let me start with you,

given that you covered the early stages of this. What do we need to know about the DOJ investigation and what had those executives actually been accused of? So they were accused of being involved

in an industry-wide conspiracy over a number of years

from around 2012 to around 2018 to fix the prices of chicken.

...