Publication
Government Investigations in Singapore 2025
We have contributed the Singapore chapter of Getting the Deal Through, Government Investigations 2025.
Publication | December 2023
On December 18, 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Department of Justice, Antitrust Division (DOJ) (together, Agencies) released updated Merger Guidelines (Guidelines). The Guidelines amend, replace and consolidate the 2010 Horizontal Merger Guidelines and the 2020 Vertical Merger Guidelines. The Guidelines are not legally binding but provide some predictability to the antitrust bar and merging parties when evaluating the antitrust risk of proposed transactions.
The Agencies previewed draft Guidelines on July 19, 2023. The Guidelines have since been updated after a two-month period in which the Agencies received more than 30,000 comments to incorporate recent case law (after facing criticism that the draft Guidelines ignored decades of recent precedent), provide more clarity, and remove some of the structural presumptions advanced in the earlier draft. The Guidelines reflect and are consistent with positions the Agencies have been taking in recent years.
The final Guidelines, which reflect softened language on some topics, retain their emphasis on transactions that tend to create a monopoly, focus on mergers that may limit rivals’ access to inputs or lead to sharing of competitively sensitive information, advance new theories of harm relating to competition in labor markets, codify aggressive new thresholds for what transactions the Agencies view as presumptively illegal and formalize a new focus on cross-market effects and serial acquisitions.
The Agencies past merger guidelines are frequently cited by courts in Section 7 cases—the Agencies are likely to cite these guidelines in challenges in the coming year in the hope that courts adopt their tighter thresholds as law.
Publication
We have contributed the Singapore chapter of Getting the Deal Through, Government Investigations 2025.
Publication
The private credit market and direct lending have grown and diversified immensely in the past decade, offering alternative sources and terms of debt compared to those historically provided by the syndicated leveraged loan and public issuance markets. Consequently, they are fast becoming pivotal components in the capital ecosystem, so much so that the Bank of England consider that the private credit market is currently responsible for approximately $1.8 trillion of debt issuance, which is four times its size in 2015. This growth has been particularly pronounced in Europe and the US but there has also been significant activity in Asia.
Publication
The EU’s Artificial Intelligence Regulation, commonly referred to as the AI Act, is expected to come into force during the summer of 2024 (the AI Act). The AI Act will be the first comprehensive legal framework for the use and development of artificial intelligence (AI), and is intended to ensure that AI systems developed and used in the EU are safe, transparent, traceable, non-discriminatory and environmentally friendly.
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