Private equity investments
FTC's merger remedies study
A CFIUS Roundup: Polaris Financial
The year 2023 will be remembered as a challenging one for private equity (PE), with complexities to navigate on many fronts. Traditional debt financing was expensive and scarce, expectations on valuations were tricky to...more
The Biden Administration's aggressive antitrust enforcers have trained their sights on private equity companies. They have signaled through enforcement activities, formal policy statements and informal interviews and speeches...more
In 2021, President Biden issued an Executive Order directing antitrust enforcers to make sure that health care would be an area of emphasis for antitrust enforcement, and in 2022 they did. Federal regulators brought several...more
Takeaways - With increasingly aggressive antitrust and foreign investment reviews, directors need to be fully informed about the risks of deals from the beginning of negotiations. Boards should insist that management and its...more
Earlier this year, Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, who leads the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Antitrust Division, announced that the Antitrust Division would eschew settlements in merger challenges in...more
Despite the aggressive rhetoric, the change in the leadership and composition at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) did not result in more enforcement in 2021. As the calendar turned to 2022, the FTC seems to be stepping...more
Antitrust scrutiny of M&A remained high during 2021, and merging parties continued to make follow-on divestitures designed to obtain antitrust clearance for their main transaction....more
In an extraordinary, perhaps unprecedented, action, parties to a proposed deal that had been under investigation for about nine months closed the transaction almost immediately upon expiration of the Hart-Scott-Rodino (“HSR”)...more
The Remedy of Divestiture: Steves and Sons, Inc. v. JELD-WEN, Inc. For what is believed to be the first time ever, a private plaintiff successfully challenged an already consummated merger under antitrust law and won...more
What happened? On September 3, 2020, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) issued a revised Merger Remedies Manual, which sets forth the Division’s framework for implementing remedies to resolve antitrust concerns in merger...more
The FTC published its views on divestiture packages used to obtain clearance under the HSR Act. According to the FTC: “Before putting pen to paper, parties should discuss with Bureau staff what assets, rights, and...more
On March 11, 2019, the Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s (“FTC’s”) Bureau of Competition and the Assistant Director of the Bureau’s Compliance Division coauthored a blog post to announce the revision of “standard...more
Driven by the influence of shareholders, activists and competitive market forces, public companies are demonstrating renewed focus on their core businesses. Reductions in the U.S. corporate tax rate from 35% to 21% have...more
The German Federal Cartel Office (Bundeskartellamt or "FCO") has published guidance on the requirements placed on remedies in merger control and their implementation. Remedies are an important instrument in merger control...more
On 3 February 2017, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released its Merger Remedies Study, which analyzed the success of merger remedies imposed by the FTC from 2006 to 2012. Nearly two decades after it issued a similar...more
In a rare appellate opinion addressing the merits of a merger challenge, the Ninth Circuit last month sided with the Federal Trade Commission, finding that a 2012 merger of two health care providers in Idaho was likely to...more
On February 10, 2015, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit (which covers Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada, Alaska, Hawaii and Arizona) ordered St. Luke’s Health System, Ltd. (“St....more
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed an Idaho federal district court’s decision ordering the divestiture of a physician practice group that had been acquired by a competing health system. The case, which...more
On February 10, in Saint Alphonsus Medical Center-Nampa v. St. Luke’s Health System (St. Alphonsus), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit handed the Federal Trade Commission yet another provider-merger win. ...more
On February 10, 2015, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) achieved a historic victory when a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that a hospital's acquisition of a physician's group – the transaction challenged by the FTC – ran afoul...more
Healthcare providers frequently consolidate to cut costs and improve patient care. These benefits can result from sharing administrative costs such as billing and electronic recordkeeping, eliminating excess capacity, better...more
On February 10, 2015, the Ninth Circuit issued its highly-anticipated decision at the intersection of health care and antitrust, affirming the lower court’s finding that a hospital-physician group merger completed nearly...more
On February 10, 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed a district court decision finding that the merger of two healthcare providers in Idaho violated antitrust laws. St. Alphonsus Medical Center-Nampa...more
On February 10, 2014, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit affirmed a district court decision, which held that St. Luke’s Health System’s (“St. Luke’s”) acquisition of Saltzer Medical Group (“Saltzer”) violated...more