The COMESA Competition Commission’s web site (http://www.comesacompetition.org/) has suffered yet another setback, only a month after AAT’s prior investigation into the apparent hacking of its online resources — it has been out of service as of 23-April-2014 (through at least the 25th), showing up as a mere white blank page.

Subordinate pages, such as the extranet page containing sensitive party information from ongoing investigations or merger reviews (http://www.comesacompetition.org/documents/private), are likewise blank.

As before, where we pointed out that the Commission’s hacking event constituted “evidence of a real risk that highly confidential party information (stemming from COMESA merger reviews or other competition investigations) may be vulnerable to accidental or intentional disclosure to unauthorized third parties,” we are alerting current or potential future parties to CCC merger reviews regarding the deficiencies in the competition enforcer’s electronic systems.  These may impact the timetable and resulting deadlines of pending merger investigations, and we advise all such interested parties to enquire with the Competition Commission about the procedural effect of the outage.