Project finance has fallen under the spotlight of competition authorities as traditional antitrust concerns over competitors’ joining forces have met with increasing worries about financial customers suffering from information asymmetries.
Against this background, pricing, and more precisely “market conditions”, has been the thread pulled by the Spanish trustbuster to unravel, felicitously or not, the long entangled knot of syndicated loans and financial derivatives in its recent Financial Derivatives decision.
In this article, the three limbs of the decision will be discussed: loan syndication as a cooperation agreement among competitors, price coordination, and loan and hedge tie-in.
Syndicated loans and financial derivatives: ‛Belling the cat’ of market conditions
Author: PabloSD
EU, competition and regulation lawyer with experience in law firms (Uría Menéndez, Slaughter and May) and the CJEU. LLM in EU Law and Economic Analysis from the College of Europe (Bruges), master's degree in European Studies from the University of Seville, bachelor’s degree in law and business from the University of Seville. Currently, antitrust counsel at technology multinational company and lecturer at Universidad Carlos III, Instituto Superior de Derecho y Economía, Universidad de Navarra and Instituto de Empresa. Board member at the Spanish Association for the Protection of Competition (AEDC) and editor at Wolters Kluwer World Competition and EU Law Live.
All views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this blog belong solely to the author, and not to the author's employer or any organisation or institution to which the author is associated.
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