Authored by Michael Gu (michaelgu@anjielaw.com)
During the first week after the Chinese New Year Holiday, the Ministry of Commerce (“MOFCOM”) published long-awaited rules on merger control cases subject to summary procedure, i.e. Interim Provisions on Standards Applied for Simple Cases of Concentration of Undertakings (“Interim Provisions”). The Interim Provisions came into effect on 12 February 2014. It has taken more than 10 months for MOFCOM to finally promulgate the Interim Provisions since the consultation draft was published for seeking public comments on 3 April 2013. However, compared with last year’s consultation draft, which contained only 7 articles, the Interim Provisions is even simpler with 6 articles in total. Except where the Interim Provisions dropped one article and made a few clarifications, no significant improvement or changes have been made to the consultation draft. The Interim Provisions mainly set out the criteria for concentrations that are suitable for treatment under the simplified review procedure. Though the Interim Provisions do not address some key procedural issues in relation to simple cases, it is expected that MOFCOM will soon release relevant supporting procedural rules and further optimize the merger control review mechanism.Continue Reading MOFCOM Published Interim Provisions on Standards Applied for Simple Merger Cases