Joan de Solà-Morales

Joan is a Partner based in RBB’s Brussels office. He has extensive experience in the economic assessment of mergers, having advised on more than 25 high-profile merger cases, including several of the most notable Phase II investigations of the European Commission of the past 15 years, and many mergers involving multi-jurisdictional filings around the world. Joan was listed in the “40 under 40” selection of Global Competition Review, which recognises the next generation of leading antitrust practitioners, and has featured in Who’s Who Legal every year since 2017, where he has been described as “one of the rising stars” and “really, really outstanding”.

Merger cases Joan has advised on include Vivendi/Lagardère, Veolia/Suez, Microsoft/Activision (advising Sony), Siemens/Alstom, Alstom/Bombardier, EssilorLuxottica/GrandVision, Dow/Dupont, Essilor/Luxottica, Blackstone/Celanese, FedEx/TNT, Cargill/ADM, Aegean/Olympic II, or UPS/TNT (advising FedEx), among others.

Joan also works regularly on abuse of dominance cases, the assessment of horizontal and vertical agreements, and antitrust damages cases. He has presented orally on numerous occasions before the European Commission and many other competition authorities around the world, especially across Europe, Latin-America and Asia. He has also given expert testimony before national and arbitration courts on competition issues and other commercial disputes.

Joan has published in specialised journals on the economic analysis of mergers and damages, speaks frequently in conferences, and is a professor at the Brussels School of Competition. He holds an MSc in Competition and Market Regulation from the Barcelona School of Economics and a Master’s degree in Economics from UAB in Barcelona, for which he also studied at UvA in Amsterdam. Before joining RBB Economics, Joan worked at the economics-focused think tank Bruegel, where he was involved in research projects on competition policy and innovation.