Germany’s Federal Cartel Office (FCO) has said it would investigate should Liberty Global and Vodafone decide to swap assets in the country. Vodafone confirmed it was in talks with Liberty Global regarding a possible exchange of assets in early June…
Germany’s Federal Cartel Office (FCO) has said it would investigate should Liberty Global and Vodafone decide to swap assets in the country.
Vodafone confirmed it was in talks with Liberty Global regarding a possible exchange of assets in early June and analysts expect the German market to be at the top of their agenda.
Commenting on the hypothetical situation, the antitrust authority’s president Andreas Mundt said it would look any transaction closely, according to quotes reported by Reuters and confirmed by the FCO.
In the event that the European Commission decided to review any deal, Mundt said the FCO might also conduct its own investigation.
Any deal would likely see mobile assets move from Vodafone to Liberty Global, or cable assets move in the opposite direction, in line with the fixed-mobile convergence trend sweeping Europe.
The last two significant telecoms transactions in Germany – Vodafone’s acquisition of Kabel Deutschland and Telefonica’s takeover of E-Plus – were approved by the EC after the FCO tried and failed to get jurisdiction over the deals.
Speaking at the TelecomFinance 2015 conference in London in February, Markus Wagemann, head of the telecommunications department at the FCO, predicted that the EC’s role in telecoms mergers would become increasingly more prominent as companies with larger revenues combined.
Local regulators may try to rule on these deals, but Wagemann did not expect the EC to delegate.
He noted that the Commission’s stance on M&A was continuing to soften and that it was understanding the operators’ perspective more than ever.
