Here are some of the developments in antitrust news this past week that we found interesting and are following.

China Hits Qualcomm With Fine.  Qualcomm has agreed to pay a $975 million fine for violating China’s antimonopoly law.  As part of the deal, Qualcomm has also agreed to lower its royalty rates on patents used in China for high-speed wireless data, which will help smartphone makers in China.

Expedia to Buy Orbitz for $1.34 Billion to Take On Priceline.  Expedia seeks to acquire Orbitz for $1.34 billion, in an effort to reclaim the lead in global online travel bookings from Priceline, and fend off newer competitors such as Google.  Although the deal would reduce competition among online travel agents, Expedia hopes that antitrust regulators will not block it in light of increased competition from Google and others in the total U.S. travel sales market.

Mergers: Commission opens in-depth investigation into proposed acquisition by Siemens of rotating equipment manufacturer Dresser-Rand.  The European Commission has opened an in-depth investigation into whether the proposed acquisition of rotating equipment manufacturer Dresser-Rand of the U.S. by Siemens of Germany complies with EU merger regulations.  Both companies supply turbo compressors as well as the engines that drive those compressors.

By Matthew L. Cantor

The Federal Trade Commission (“FTC”) chalked up another victory against a healthcare merger yesterday as the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the decision of the U.S. District Court for the District of Idaho blocking a merger between St. Luke’s Health System and a primary care physician (“PCP”) group in Nampa, Idaho.

The appellate court’s decision in the closely-watched case of St. Alphonsus Medical Center v. St. Luke’s Health System held that the district court correctly found that, even though the merger could have improved the delivery of health care in the Nampa market, such a defense was inadequate under antitrust law because there was no showing that the merger would increase competition or decrease prices.  Notably, the Ninth Circuit agreed with the lower court that the issue of patient outcomes was irrelevant to whether the merger offended antitrust law under Section 7 of the Clayton Act.  The Ninth Circuit held that the merger was anticompetitive, particularly because the merger would have increased concentration in the relevant market for PCP services in Nampa and barriers to entry in that market are high.

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A View from Constantine Cannon’s London Office

By Irene Fraile

A recent lively discussion with European Commission competition officials indicates that antitrust enforcement is continuing to evolve to deal with the thorny issues raised by so-called “reverse-payment” or “pay-for-delay” patent litigation settlements designed to delay the sale of generic drugs.

On January 29, 2015, Brussels Matters (which hosts informal discussions with senior EU officials) hosted the first pan-EU discussion with officials from the European Commission’s Directorate General for Competition (“DG COMP”) after the Commission’s Lundbeck decision, which imposed hefty fines for entering into pay-for-delay agreements that violated EU antitrust rules that prohibit anticompetitive agreements.

In that June 19, 2013, decision, the Commission imposed a fine of 93.8 million euros on the Danish pharmaceutical company Lundbeck and fines totalling 52.2 million euros on several producers of generic medicines for delaying generic market entry of the drug Citalopram.  This was the first EU infringement decision concerning pay-for-delay agreements.

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A View from Constantine Cannon’s London Office

By Yulia Tosheva and James Ashe-Taylor

The European Commission (“EC”) has fined London-based ICAP, the world’s largest broker of interest-rate swaps, for facilitating bank cartels in the market for Yen-denominated interest rate derivatives.

The EC already imposed heavy fines of 669 million euros on UBS, the Royal Bank of Scotland, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup and the British broker, RP Martin, in December 2013, after they admitted their involvement in several cartels that manipulated the Yen Libor benchmark.  The cartels involved traders’ discussions on Japanese Yen Libor submissions and exchange of commercially sensitive information on trading positions and future Japanese Yen Libor submissions.  As part of the same investigation, the EC opened proceedings against ICAP, which refused to admit guilt and did not join the financial institutions in paying fines to settle the case.

The EC’s investigation concluded that ICAP facilitated six out of the seven Japanese Yen cartels, in particular by disseminating misleading information about expected Japanese Yen Libor rates, serving as a communications channel between traders and using its contacts at various banks in an attempt to influence their Yen Libor submissions.

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Here are some of the developments in antitrust news this past week that we found interesting and are following.

Staples and Office Depot Say a Merger Will Keep Them Competitive.  Staples and Office Depot are hoping to convince antitrust regulators that their $6.3 billion merger should be approved because the office supply world’s a different place from what it was in 1997, when their previous attempt to combine was blocked by the FTC.  The two retailers are arguing that the past 18 years has seen the business selling office supplies become more competitive due to efforts by rivals such as Walmart, Target and Amazon.

Last Swing in Court by San Jose to Get Oakland A’s to City.  The San Jose City Council has voted to seek Supreme Court review of the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that baseball’s antitrust exemption bars San Jose’s lawsuit that aims to stop Major League Baseball from blocking the Oakland Athletics’ proposed move to the city.  The Ninth Circuit’s reluctant application of the anachronistic—yet still followed—baseball antitrust exemption was examined by this blog last month.

Assistant Attorney General Bill Baer Delivers Remarks at the Global Competition Review Fourth Annual Antitrust Law Leaders Forum.  Bill Baer, the top antitrust enforcer at the U.S. Department of Justice, gave a speech warning that merging companies had better be prepared to make meaningful concessions designed to boost competition, or risk being sued by the DOJ’s Antitrust Division. The antitrust enforcer discussed the concessions that the parties had to concede in order to win regulatory approval of the $11 billion American Airlines-US Airways merger, and Anheuser-Busch InBev’s $20 billion acquisition of Grupo Modelo.