June 17, 2026, 10:15 GMT | Insight
Companies may be able to pursue anticompetitive mergers if German government plans to require fewer deals to obtain approval before closing are enacted, the country's top competition regulator has warned. Andreas Mundt said the danger was compounded by the fact that it is very difficult to fix competition problems introduced by a merger once it has taken place.
Moves to exempt more mergers from competition scrutiny in Germany pose a risk to competition and consumers, the head of Germany’s competition authority has warned.
Bundeskartellamt president Andreas Mundt told an event* that many companies were biding their time until Germany's merger notification criteria are raised to do deals that would presently raise concerns, often at the local or regional level.
To make matters worse, he said, experience showed that competition regulators had no effective tools to tackle anticompetitive mergers once they have taken place.
On May 29, the German government proposed a series of changes to the national competition framework that intended to streamline antitrust procedures, ease administrative burdens for businesses and grant new investigatory powers to the Bundeskartellamt (see
here).
Mundt on Wednesday welcomed changes that would allow the competition authority to scan public procurement tenders for cartels or would give competition litigation faster access to Germany's top court.
But he said the Bundeskartellamt had not requested a change that would, on the one hand, reduce the number of deals that need merger approval while, on the other, give the office the power to call in certain types of deals that don’t require notification.
According to some estimates, the number of deals notified to the authority would decline by up to 14 percent.
“There is the risk of under-enforcement … We know companies that are only waiting for those thresholds to be raised [so their] mergers go through,” Mundt said.
On post-deal measures, he added: “We do not have a clue how to deal with markets where it has gone wrong because we have not been able to scrutinize certain mergers or we have given leeway.”
But when a market has consolidated too much, leading prices to go up or quality or innovation to go down, “there is no clue yet how to deal with these kinds of markets.”
* European Competition Forum Brussels Breakfast Reception, Gleiss Lutz, Brussels, June 17, 2026.
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