Francisco Enrique González‑Díaz

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The European Commission (EC) has published a draft of its long-awaited revision of the Merger Guidelines (Draft Guidelines), combining the 2004 Horizontal Merger Guidelines and 2008 Non-Horizontal Merger Guidelines into a single document that is organized around different theories of harm and endeavors to achieve five principal objectives: (1) to take account of the Draghi Report’s call for more dynamic, forward-looking merger control; (2) to acknowledge the benefits of scale, resilience, innovation, and global competitiveness; (3) to reflect the evolution in EC practice over the past 20 years; (4) to tighten the rules for acquisitions by dominant companies; and (5) to signal a greater readiness to take positive account of efficiencies and other benefits. 

On November 1, 2025, the Commission issued a policy brief[1] in which it rejected calls to extend the legal professional privilege to in-house counsel communication. The Commission examined the question after stakeholders called for such an extension as part of the revision process of the regulation governing antitrust investigation, Regulation 1/2003.[2]

Introduction

On November 13, 2024, the General Court dismissed three appeals against the European Commission’s decision conditionally approving Vodafone’s acquisition of Liberty Global’s cable business assets in four EU Member States.[1]  Deutsche Telekom, NetCologne, and Tele Columbus brought actions before the General Court seeking the annulment of the Commission’s clearance decision, arguing that the Commission should not have cleared Vodafone’s acquisition subject to behavioral commitments.

On September 3, 2024, in a landmark decision, the European Court of Justice – the EU’s highest court – ruled in favor of Illumina in its challenge to the EC’s unprecedented assertion of jurisdiction over a transaction that met no notification thresholds at either EU or Member State level.

In a landmark decision announced on September 6, 2022 (“Decision”), the European Commission (“EC”) prohibited the acquisition by Illumina, a U.S. company specialising in genomic sequencing, of GRAIL, a U.S.-based start-up developing early cancer-detection tests (“Transaction”).[1]