The UK-EU Competition Cooperation Agreement: Closer Apart?

At the end of 2020, the United Kingdom (UK) and the European Union (EU) signed the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), which both parties then ratified in 2021. As to antitrust cooperation, the agreement emphasized the need for cooperation and coordination when the EU and UK antitrust authorities are analyzing the same or related conduct or transactions.¹ More concretely, the TCA envisaged that detailed cooperation mechanisms would be agreed and signed in the future.²

Those pledges remain unfulfilled. In May 2023, following a somewhat heated disagreement over the Microsoft/Activision transaction,³ the heads of both the EU and UK antitrust authorities publicly called for a cooperation agreement.⁴ One year later, formal discussions began.⁵