Canada’s Competition Bureau has released final revisions to its Merger Enforcement Guidelines.

The Guidelines describe how the Competition Bureau will analyze merger transactions. 

The new Guidelines were issued on October 6, 2011, after the Bureau held consultations during the last two years with foreign competition agencies and throughout Canada.  The changes are the first revisions to the Guidelines since 2004. 

The Guidelines were changed after the United States revised its Horizontal Merger Guidelines in 2010.  As we reported in an earlier post, the U.S. revisions offered a more tolerant approach for analyzing mergers by downplaying the role of market definition and by emphasizing the need to avoid interference with competitively beneficial mergers. 

Some of the Canadian revisions follow the U.S. approach by having less of an emphasis on market definition and by looking more at the competitive effects of a merger.  Other features of the new Guidelines include discussing how a merger is defined under the Competition Act, providing for greater scrutiny of vertical mergers, and giving an update to the merger “efficiencies defence.”

The European Commission is expected to unveil proposed legislation in the coming weeks designed to curb speculation in commodities trading, which has been blamed for sharp increases in energy and food prices.

A draft of the Commission’s proposed revisions to the EU’s 2004 Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (“MiFID”) obtained by some news outlets would require “that all trading venues on which commodity derivative contracts are traded adopt appropriate [position] limits or alternative arrangements to ensure the orderly functioning of the market and settlement conditions for physically delivered commodities and provide systematic, granular and standardised information on positions by different types of financial and commercial traders to regulators … and market participants ….”

The Commission is reported to be simultaneously drawing up plans for an overhaul of the Market Abuse Directive (“MAD”) enacted in 2003.  If adopted by the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament, that reform would give European regulators enhanced authority to investigate trading systems on spot commodity markets, which had thus far escaped effective oversight.

Reuters has quoted a leaked draft of the Commission’s proposal as saying that “By gaining access to spot commodity market traders’ systems, competent authorities are also able to monitor real-time data flows.”

The Commission’s proposed amendments to MiFID and MAD are expected to be made public – officially, this time – this month.

The U.S. Department of Justice has announced that Tokyo based manufacturer Bridgestone Corp. has agreed to plead guilty to rigging bids and making corrupt payments to government officials in Latin America related to the sale of marine hose and other industrial products.

As part of the plea bargain struck with the Department of Justice, Bridgestone is pleading guilty to violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and Sherman Act, and will pay a $28 million fine.

The alleged antitrust conspiracy concerns the sale of marine hose, a flexible rubber hose used to transfer oil between tankers and storage facilities.

According to the Department of Justice, Bridgestone and its co-conspirators agreed to allocate shares of the marine hose market by not competing for one another’s customers either by not submitting prices or bids, or by submitting intentionally high prices or bids to certain customers.  Bridgestone allegedly received marine hose prices for customers from an alleged “coordinator” of the conspiracy and then sold the marine hose to those customers at collusive and noncompetitive prices.  The Department of Justice claims that Bridgestone concealed the conspiracy through code names, private email accounts, and telephone numbers.

The plea agreement commends Bridgestone’s cooperation with the Department of Justice, and acknowledges Bridgestone’s “extensive remediation” efforts.

The U.K.’s Competition Commission has announced that it has provisionally found that British Sky Broadcasting’s control over the pay TV movie market is restricting competition among rivals, leading to higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.

The investigation, which the Commission began in August 2010, followed a three-year study of the pay TV market by the U.K.’s communications regulator, Ofcom.

According to the Commission’s findings, Sky has held the exclusive rights to distribute first releases of movies on pay TV from the six largest Hollywood studios for the past 20 years.  The lead investigator for the Commission noted that Sky’s position as the largest provider of pay TV in the U.K. has allowed it to continually outbid its rivals for these rights. 

The Commission found that Sky’s exercise of these rights and its market dominance cost consumers £50-£60 million ($80-$95 million) a year more than they otherwise would have paid in a more competitive market.  The Commission also found that while Sky provided first releases of movies to one of its competitors, Virgin Media, to distribute, it did so at unfavorable rates.

The Commission has proposed three possible remedies for which it seeks comment: (1) restricting the number of studios granting exclusive rights to Sky; (2) restricting the nature of those rights (such as by allowing for competitors to have concurrent distribution rights through other means); and/or (3) requiring Sky to purchase and offer to its subscribers movie channels created by its rivals.

The Commission’s final report is due August 3, 2012.

Banks in the European Payments Council (EPC) are being probed by the antitrust department of the European Commission (EC) as a result of Payment Network AG’s complaint that it was locked out of the process to set the standard for streamlining payments systems in Europe.

EPC members include banks such as Lloyds TSB, Citibank, Barclays, UBS, HSBC Holdings Plc and Deutsche Bank AG.

The EPC is the “decision-making and coordination body of the European banking industry in relation to payments” that was formed to implement a Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA).  SEPA is a “European Union integration initiative in the area of payments” involving standards and practices aimed at a Single Market for payments in Europe. 

According to the EPC, the group must answer an EC request for information about the “cooperation of banks and payment institutions for designing rules and standards for e-payment services.”  The investigation was sparked after Payment Network AG accused the EPC of excluding it from the standard-setting process altogether, after several requests last year from Payment Network to become involved in the creation of a draft standard and logo were ignored by the EPC.

If Payment Network is excluded from the proposed SEPA standards, it would be unable to display the proposed SEPA logo used by rivals, which could be a big competitive disadvantage if consumers believed its network was not secure.

The EPC claims it is receiving “diverging messages” from regulators who are asking for accelerated adoption of common standards to ease payments made in Euros, but at the same time scrutinizing the decisions made by the group in the name of competition.