On 24 March 2020, the Swedish Competition Authority (SCA) cleared Gasum Oy’s acquisition of AGA Clean Energy and Nauticor Marine Bunkering from Linde AG, with conditions. The Norwegian Competition Authority had already on 12 March cleared the acquisition without conditions.
The parties are active in selling liquified natural gas (LNG) to customers located in Sweden and Norway. Since there are relatively few LNG suppliers in the Nordics, the competition authorities had concerns that the merger may reduce actual and future competition for some specific customer groups.
RBB assisted the parties in illustrating that the parties exerted limited competition on each other pre-merger. Hence, the potential loss of competition from the merger would be negligible. The assessment was in large accepted by the competition authorities that cleared the merger in phase I.
The press release to the Swedish decision can be found here.
RBB worked alongside law firms Castrén & Snellman, Bokwall Rislund, Selmer, Mannheimer Swartling and Gleiss Lutz.
