Our Corporate and M&A team provides commercially focused competition law advice. We take a proactive approach to ensuring that our clients’ commercial agreements and business transactions comply fully with EU and Irish competition law.
We advise on all aspects of EU law relating to the free movement of goods and services across all business sectors.
We are specialist legal advisers on mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures and their notification to the relevant competition authorities. We have significant experience in proposing legal solutions to ensure that our clients avoid infringement of EU and Irish competition laws.
Our competition law services include:
- Competition compliance.
- Prohibition of abusive behaviour by dominant operators in the marketplace.
- Preparation of complaints to national and EU competition authorities designed to prevent anti-competitive behaviour by private or State undertakings.
- Representing clients in their dealings with Irish and EU competition and regulatory agencies.
- Pricing issues.
- Parallel trading.
- State Aids.
- Product tying and refusals to supply.
Representative transactions include advising:
- Centric Health on the sale of its private emergency/minor injury business to the VHI and the necessary CCPC submissions.
- The members of a joint venture in the port sector on the impact of Irish and EU competition rules on their proposed joint venture and the subsequent submission to the CCPC.
- BNP Paribas on its acquisition of Credit Suisse’s fund administration arm with subsequent submission to the CCPC.
- Tesco Mobile on the launch of Ireland’s first mobile virtual telecommunications operator together with ongoing legal and telecommunications regulatory support.
- Vivas Health (now Hibernian Health), the third entrant to the Irish private health insurance market, on all regulatory matters affecting competition including correspondence with Irish and EU competition enforcement agencies.
- Aer Arann on its correspondence with the European Commission in relation to competition issues in the Irish aviation sector.
- Falcon Holidays on commercial, electronic communications and competition law issues concerning the distribution of package holidays.
- Tele 2 Denmark on its communications with the European Commission on competition in the Danish telecommunications sector.
