Fear of the Chinese or Business as Usual at the European Commission? EU Merger Regulation and the Assessment of Transactions Involving Chinese State-owned Enterprises

In the first half of 2011 the European Commission (“Commission”) published three decisions involving State-owned enterprises (“SOE”) that are Chinese. The Commission stated that it had examined both whether the decision-making power lay with the controlling entity above them and to what extent they competed with other public companies. Joaquín Almunia, European Commissioner for Competition, has stressed that this type of examina