June 16, 2026, 16:19 GMT | Insight
Companies considering mergers are getting a clearer view of the possible ways to pitch their transactions and how they will be reviewed, without creating any new avenues for clearance, according to the EU’s top competition official. Anthony Whelan, director-general of DG Competition, said the new guidelines, which were unveiled on April 30, “do not make anything possible that was not previously possible.”
Companies considering mergers are getting a clearer view of the possible ways to pitch their transactions and how they will be reviewed, without creating any new avenues for clearance, according to the EU’s top competition official.
Anthony Whelan, director-general of DG Competition, said at a conference* in Brussels: “The draft guidelines, as they are now — and, I expect, as they will be adopted — do not make anything possible that was not previously possible. What they aim to do is to make the realm of possibilities clearer for all involved.” The new guidelines were unveiled on April 30.
With European leaders calling for a greater focus on economic growth and competitiveness, the bloc’s policy on mergers has come under pressure in recent years.
Some industries and countries such as France and Germany have advocated a loosening of the
European Commission’s rules on reviewing transactions to allow for the emergence of larger “champion” companies.
The underlying regulation that enshrines review powers remains untouched, but the commission has redrafted related guidelines, giving signals of how officials will review transactions that build scale and enhance economic resilience.
Whelan stressed that his staff would already apply the approach in the guidelines and their concepts, even before formal adoption, because “they are all fully embedded and present in the Merger Regulation.”
Some companies have argued that the guidelines open up new pathways to approve deals, interpreting them to look more kindly on “scale,” and allow dealmakers to argue more explicitly that there are “benefits” flowing from a transaction.
Whelan said that officials would look at “dynamic effects” of a merger, such as on investment and innovation. And companies will now have the option to put forward a “theory of benefits” when advocating their merger, and not just try to argue against the prospective “harms” of a tie-up.
The director-general stressed that the burden for a company to prove benefits was the same as for the commission to prove the harm. Furthermore, the benefits have to be not only for the companies, but also for the general consumer and economic interest.
Speaking on a separate panel at the same event, Andreas Mundt, president of the German competition authority, noted Whelan’s comments but said he saw, in the guidelines, “a bit of an attempt to do some changes.”
“I believe that the Merger Guidelines, as they now lay on the table, are the product of much political influence,” Mundt said. “I do believe that they aim at giving the European Commission a certain degree of flexibility, which probably it would not have [from the previous guidelines].”
The German enforcer said the true test for the new text would be in their application.
* European Competition Forum Midsummer Meeting, Brussels, June 16-18, 2026.
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