On Thursday 6 July, the European Commission sent three separate statements of objections to Merck/Sigma-Aldrich, General Electric and Canon, expressing concerns that these three companies may have breached the rules of procedure when notifying merger operations.
Although the objections relate only to procedural aspects, they are not the same for all three companies. General Electric is accused of failing to provide the Commission with all necessary information on the acquisition of LM Wind and its future position on the wind energy market in its initial notification on 11 January of this year. The company then made a further notification on 13 February with the missing information.
Merck and Sigma-Aldrich are being brought to book for providing inaccurate information when notifying a merger operation between the two companies on 21 April 2015, when information on an innovation project was omitted.
As for Canon, it stands accused of acquiring Toshiba Medical Systems Corporation before the operation was notified to the Commission on 12 August 2016, by means of a so-called 'warehousing' structure.
The operations themselves not in question
The institution decided to carry out separate investigations into the three companies in question in order to determine whether they had failed in their obligations under EU law. However, these investigations concern only the procedural rules and therefore do not call into question previous decisions in which the European Commission approved the merger operations.
Margrethe Vestager, the Commissioner for Competition, said that “we need companies to work with us to ensure fast and predictable merger control, to the benefit of both companies and consumers”. When we approve mergers subject to conditions, “the information they supply us must be correct and complete”, she added, at a press conference.
Potential sanctions
If it turns out that General Electric and Merck/Sigma-Aldrich did deliberately or negligently provide the Commission with incorrect information, they could be fined up to 1% of their global turnover. As for Canon, if the Commission finds that the acquisition of Toshiba Medical Systems Corporation did indeed take place before it was notified, the company risks a fine equivalent to 10% of its global turnover.
These investigations bring to mind the fine handed down to Facebook by the European Commission on 18 May of this year (see EUROPE 11791), when the institution found that the social networking giant had provided it with incorrect information when it notified its acquisition of WhatsApp in 2014. (Original version in French by Lucas Tripoteau)