The first-ever COMESA-sponsored competition law workshop focussed solely on the business community, currently underway in Nairobi, Kenya, stretches the capacity of the Hilton conference room where it is being held. The event’s tag line is “Benefits to Business.” Especially now, with the African continent sporting over 400 companies with over $500m in annual revenues, the […]
Events focus on media & business community’s understanding of competition rules and practical workload of CCC Media For two days this week, COMESA will hold its 5th annual “Regional Sensitization Workshop for Business Reporters“, focussed on provisions and application of the COMESA competition regulations and trade developments within the 19-country common market. Over 30 journalists […]
COMESA CCC clears 5 notified mergers At their July 29, 2015 meeting, COMESA Competition Commissioners Chikankheni, Langa, and Okilangole rendered decisions in five merger cases notified earlier in the spring. The affected sectors are: Packaging (Nampak), Retail (Steinhoff), Academic Publishing (Springer Verlag), Telecom Towers (Eaton Towers), and Non-Alcoholic Beverages (Coca-Cola). Ethos/Nampak MER/03/01/2015 SOM/8/2015 Decision/10/2015 29/07/2015 […]
COMESA officials’ pronouncements: merger enforcement #1, cartel ‘follow-on enforcement’, jurisdictional swamp As other attendees of the 17 July 2015 regional sensitisation workshop have done, the Zimbabwean daily NewsDay has reported on the Livingstone, Zambia event — a session that has yielded a plethora of rather interesting pronouncements from COMESA Competition Commission (“CCC”) officials, including on non-merger enforcement by […]
COMESA publishes new Merger Assessment Guidelines, uses back-door defintion to adjust threshold to >$5 million On Friday, the COMESA Competition Commission published its 2014 Merger Assessment Guidelines, available here in PDF. They finally replace the prior Draft Guidelines, which the agency’s Willard Mwemba had predicted would be finalised no later than June 2014. The new […]
Zambia hosts COMESA Competition Commission workshop to sensitize journalists to antitrust As many African news outlets are reporting, their journalists were recently invited to take part in a competition-law “sensitization workshop” hosted by high-ranking CCC personnel in Livingstone, Zambia. In light of COMESA’s currently lackluster merger enforcement and virtually non-existing merger notifications (none since 19 […]
Site down – 5 “comfort letters in 5 months – Guidelines revision by June In an almost farcical repetition of its information-technology woes, the COMESA Competition Commission’s web site (http://www.comesacompetition.org/) is off-line, yet again, after having been successfully hacked multiple times. Whether the latest outage is due to a similar attack or simply (and hopefully) […]
For the third time in a month, the fledgling pan-African antitrust enforcer’s web site has been disabled by hackers As competition-law attorneys counseling clients on the necessity of notifying mergers in the COMESA jurisdiction, we view these developments with – put mildly – shock. This is especially true as confidential party data and documents would […]
Strong numbers from early 2014 did not hold up After posting a record three merger notifications in January, the COMESA Competition Commission has seen its M&A filing statistics decline to zero in February and merely one in March. As we have reported here (optimistic for 2014) and here (pessimistic on 2013 statistics), COMESA’s notified M&A […]
Attack shows risk of unauthorized disclosure of confidential commercial party information It would appear that the young pan-African antitrust enforcement agency’s web site has been hacked. The headline on the COMESA Competition Commission’s (“CCC”) home page today seems to indicate a relationship with a web site bearing the Indonesian TLD (top-level domain) “.ID”, and looks […]
