Mr. Brian McHugh:

I will try to keep my answer on the merger process at a high level.

Effectively, if the merger or acquisition is relatively large, it will be notifiable. If it is very large and it crosses multiple member states, it will go to the European Commission, so there is effectively a formula which will bring it to the European Commission or it will come to us. We will then publish that on our website and look for third-party views in regard to the merger. We will then go through a process of analysing the merger and looking at a variety of issues.

This is where I do not want to go into a huge amount of detail but I will mention a few things. We will look at what the market is and the market definition, for example, the market might be the processing of beef. We will look at the geographical market and whether it is within the State or international. For beef, whether the market is international or within the State could be a key question that would have to be answered. We then look at the market generally, for example, we look at barriers to entry and how difficult it is for someone new to come into the market and, therefore, that might be a measure of how hard it is for the larger player to drive prices up, or down, from the point of view of farmers. We would look at the evidence on all of those things. Then, on the other side, we look at what we call buyer power. Effectively, we are trying to get to the point of understanding whether this new bigger player has the power, as a result of the merger, in normal circumstances, to drive up the price and impose a sustainable price increase that consumers have to pay. From the point of view of farmers, we can turn that around and talk about the power to reduce prices paid to farmers.

Those are the types of things we will look at. We will go through evidence from third parties and look at precedents. We look at a lot of mergers and, in fact, we looked at nearly 100 last year. Where the evidence says that a merger should not be approved or the company needs to make divestments, we are not afraid to say this. We have had two such cases this year where we have demanded divestments from the companies and, effectively, if they wanted the merger to go ahead, they needed to sell a chunk of the business because, otherwise, there would be a significant risk to competition in that market. When we follow our analysis and follow the evidence, we will make a decision. We have no fear whatsoever about taking a decision to prevent mergers or to demand divestments.