Response to the European Commission’spublic consultation on the application of the EC Merger Regulation
Department of Policy and Business Practices
Publication date : 15/12/2008
The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) welcomes the opportunity to continue its constructive dialogue with the European Commission and comment on the current working of Regulation (EC) No 139/2004 (ECMR)1.
Since its adoption, the ECMR has been a success. Particularly the 'one-stop-shop' aspect provides businesses with significant benefits. The recent accessions extended the reach of the ECMR,
reducing filing burdens in larger transactions.
ICC believes that there is a real benefit in extending the ECMR yet further to all transactions that would otherwise require filings in a number of member states.
The intention of achieving this through Article 1(3) was not, however, successful.
Less than 5% of all ECMR cases have “community dimension" by virtue of Article 1(3).
While there are no public statistics which look at the number of multijurisdictional filings of concentrations that lack community dimension, members' anecdotal evidence is clear that there
is still a significant number of cases that require filings in three or more member states.
ICC supports a downward revision of the thresholds in Article 1 as this would lead to a larger number of cases bein