Antitrust, Regulation and Foreign Investment

Ashurst has an experienced global anti-trust, regulation and foreign investment practice, with a team of over 80 lawyers and economists providing advice from our offices in Abu Dhabi, Brisbane, Brussels, Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Madrid, Melbourne, Milan, Munich, Paris, Singapore and Sydney.

Our team is highly experienced across the full suite of competition law issues including advising on merger control (including multi-jurisdictional filings), cartels/anti-competitive agreements, abuse of dominance, market/sector investigations, competition litigation, consumer law, state aid, public procurement, foreign direct investment and trade law, together with sector-specific regulation across a range of regulated industries. We advise clients globally, including in the Middle East and across Asia, as well as in Europe and Australia. We deal with the European Commission and European courts on a daily basis, as well as the regulatory authorities in numerous jurisdictions around the world.

Regulation is of increasing importance as authorities seek to regulate competition and enforce antitrust rules. Companies increasingly face the risk that their industry will be closely scrutinised. We have advised in relation to a number of market studies and market investigations carried out by the European Commission and national competition authorities. Our team has expertise in dealing with sector regulators and has wide experience of advising on cases involving parallel antitrust and regulatory review processes.

We have broad experience in the rapidly evolving area of foreign investment. We regularly manage FDI analysis and processes on deals across multiple jurisdictions, assessing the sensitivities of the activities at stake, ensuring filings are executed in a coordinated and consistent manner and assisting our clients with the negotiation of commitments or conditions that can be imposed by governments, in all cases working with trusted local counsel where appropriate.

We are also one of the very few international law firms with an in-house team of economists and believe that robust commercial antitrust advice must be grounded in solid economic assessment from the outset. Our fully integrated legal and economics expertise mirrors teams fielded by competition authorities, and clients consistently identify this as a crucial differentiating factor that adds significant value across the board, but particularly in complex matters.