UK Law and Practice Contributed by: Alex Stratakis and Marc Freedman, Van Bael & Bellis
been publicised (see 3.5 Information Included in a Filing ). With respect to documents published by the CMA in the context of an investigation, the par - ties may request that certain commercially sensi - tive information is kept confidential and excised from such documents before publication. 7.4 Co-Operation With Other Jurisdictions The CMA generally seeks to co-operate with other competition authorities in multi-jurisdic - tional mergers. This co-operation may relate to substantive assessment of the transaction, the discussion of any potential or actual remedies and, where appropriate, the gathering of infor - mation to facilitate co-ordinating certain stages of the investigation timetables between the CMA and other competition authorities. However, the CMA maintains its independence as a decision-making authority uninfluenced by the decisions of other regulators. In particular, whilst generally speaking the CMA and Euro - pean Commission have in recent years been relatively aligned in terms of their merger control decision-making, there are still some notable rel - atively recent examples of divergence, such as: • Cargotec/Konecranes and Microsoft/Activi- sion , where the UK took a more interven - tionist approach compared to the European Commission; and • Booking/eTraveli and Amazon/iRobot , where – in both cases – the European Commission challenged a transaction that the CMA had cleared unconditionally at Phase 1. As the CMA is not permitted to disclose the con - fidential information of businesses, it will typi - cally ask merging parties to sign a confidentiality
• during a Phase 2 review, the CMA will usu - ally publish key documents (with confidential information excised) related to the transaction on its website, which third parties may be invited to comment on. 7.2 Contacting Third Parties See 7.1 Third-Party Rights . The CMA may request or invite information from third parties in writing or orally. In practice, this may take the form of questionnaires, telephone calls and/or online or in-person meetings. In addition, the CMA may require third parties to provide information or documents, or give evi - dence as a witness, by issuing a Section 109 Notice, which constitutes a mandatory request (see 3.6 Penalties/Consequences of Incom- plete Notification ). In the context of remedies, and following its pro - visional finding of an SLC, the CMA will invite comments from interested third parties on any proposed remedies (see 5.4 Negotiating Rem- edies With Authorities ). 7.3 Confidentiality The CMA has an obligation to protect the confi - dentiality of commercially sensitive information provided to it by the merging parties as well as interested third parties of a transaction. How - ever, the CMA is also required to publish its deci - sions as well as the supporting reasons, which sometimes creates a trade-off between these two obligations. During its investigation, the CMA will actively publicise the transaction at issue so as to solicit views from interested third parties. Therefore, upon submitting a merger notice, parties are required to confirm that the transaction has
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