Rogers, Shaw face off against competition watchdog in court over $20-billion merger

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Rogers and Shaw are finally having their day in court to argue against the Competition Bureau, which sued to block the deal. Read more here.

It’s been a long haul for the Rogers family and Rogers Communications Inc. since they announced a takeover offer for Shaw Communications Inc. in March 2021. Executives from both companies confidently predicted they could steer the $20 billion transaction through regulators in a little more than a year.Sign up to receive the daily top stories from the Financial Post, a division of Postmedia Network Inc.

“What you’re witnessing is a remarkably stubborn refusal by the commissioner to recognize reality,” Kent Thomson, a lawyer for Shaw, said at a pretrial conference on Nov. 1.Rogers, Canada’s largest wireless company by number of subscribers, pursued the deal as a way to fill in gaps in its network in Western Canada and become a truly national communications company.

The bizarre sequence did nothing to enhance the family’s reputation. Nor did Rogers Communications help its cause for the merger when its networks collapsed one day in July — knocking consumers offline, disrupting business payments and even forcing the postponement of a concert by The Weeknd. Canada’s competition law is remedy-oriented, according to Jennifer Quaid, a law professor at the University of Ottawa. Merging companies have a powerful legal weapon in the “efficiencies defence,” which allows them to argue that the cost savings involved in a deal are so great that they outweigh the harmful impacts on competition.

 

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