COMESA Merger Mania

To answer our rhetorical question in the title above: We don’t believe so.  For the merger junkies among our readership, here is AAT’s latest instalment of “COMESA MergerMania” — AfricanAntitrust’s occasional look at merger matters reviewed by the young multi-jurisdictional competition enforcers in south/eastern Africa.  (To see our last post on COMESA merger statistics, click here).

COMESA publishes new Merger Filings, still fails to identify dates thereof

As nobody else seems to be doing this, let us compile the latest news in merger notifications to the COMESA Competition Commission.  Prior to doing so, however, we observe one item of utility and basic house-keeping etiquette, which we hope will be heeded in future official releases by the agency: Please note the dates of (and on the) documents being issued.  Using the date as a ‘case ID’ is insufficient in our view — the CCC’s current PDF pronouncements invariably remain un-dated, a practice which AAT deplores and which simply does not conform to international business (or government) standards.  So: please date your press releases, opinions, decisions, and notifications on the documents themselves.

We observe that the matters below have not yet been assigned final “case numbers” (at least not publicly) in the style typical of the CCC decisions in the past, namely sequential numbers per year, as they are currently under investigation and have not yet been decided.

We also note that one notification in particular appears to have been retroactively made in 2014, even though it is identified as merger no. 3 of 2015 (Gateway), a peculiarity we cannot currently explain.  Likewise, AAT wonders what the “44” stands for in its case ID (“12/44/2014”), we surmise it’s a typo and should be “14” instead.

	Internal Case ID	Statement of Merger
Holtzbrinck PG/ Springer Science	MER/04/06/2015	SOM/6/2015
Eaton Towers/ Kenya, Malawi, Uganda Towers	MER/04/05/2015	SOM/5/2015
Coca-Cola BAL/ Coca-Cola SABCO	MER/04/07/2015	SOM/4/2015
Gateway/Pan Africa	MER/12/44/2014	SOM/3/2015
Old Mutual/UAP	MER/03/04/2015	SOM/2/2015
Zamanita /Cargill	MER/03/03/2015	SOM/1//2015

Which brings us to the bi-monthly…

AAT COMESA Merger Statistics Roundup