Latham & Watkins
In recent years there have been markedly increased levels of scrutiny from regulators over the sharing of sensitive information between competitors in the process of mergers, takeovers, and other corporate transactions. As a result, M&A deal teams are increasingly turning to clean-team arrangements to ensure that a competing business purchaser can review competitively sensitive data during its due diligence, while addressing ‘gun-jumping’ rules and competition law concerns.
One recent example of the risk resulting from sharing sensitive data between competitors is the record fines imposed by the European Commission (EC) in April 2018 on Dutch cable and telecommunications group, Altice, for receiving commercially sensitive information, among other things, from the target businesses involved in the respective transactions prior to obtaining competition clearance (see box ‘EC takes tougher stance… ’).
