We would like to present you the report on merger control proceedings in Poland in 2018. The study was prepared by the experts of Sołtysiński Kawecki & Szlęzak: Krzysztof Kanton, Dr. Jarosław Łukawski and Szymon Murek.
Full content of the report is available in the PDF.
2018 represents another year with a significant number of concentrations notified to the President of the Polish Competition Authority (the “UOKiK”), as well as number of decisions issued in those cases. In the last 12 months, UOKiK initiated 247 proceedings and issued 233 merger decisions.
In the previous year, UOKiK did not issue any conditional or prohibition decisions. In this context, it is worth mentioning that in 3 cases the proceedings were terminated due to a withdrawal of the notification by the parties following receipt of UOKiK’s statement of objections. We assume that the withdrawals allowed to avoid a formal prohibition of implementing a concentration related to impossibility of working out remedies which would be acceptable to UOKiK.
The average time of proceedings ended by issuance of phase I clearance amounted to more than 36 calendar days (with the shortest proceedings lasting 6 days and the longest 157 days). In turn, the average time of proceedings which ended with a formal decision after phase II proceedings amounted to nearly 215 calendar days (with the shortest proceedings lasting 127 days and the longest 350 days). At the same time, only 8 UOKiK’s decisions were issued after conducting phase II proceedings, and in 5 cases phase II proceedings were not closed before the end of 2018.
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