Professor Ioannis Kokkoris comments on the Lufthansa and ITA Airways merger for POLITICO’s Fair Play newsletter.
Photo by Joe Ambrogio.
The Lufthansa and ITA Airways merger is set to be greenlit by the European Commission after months of pushback from the European Union’s regulators. The EU regulators were concerned if the deal really will stoke more competition to replace what could be lost when the companies merge.
Ioannis Kokkoris, Professor of Competition Law and Economics and Director of the Centre for Commercial Law Studies at Queen Mary University of London, sees the Commission now taking a “harsher approach to airline transactions” with “more creative” and “intrusive” concessions such as not allowing ITA to join Lufthansa’s lucrative transatlantic flight consortium for two years.
This was reported in POLITICO’s Fair Play newsletter, a weekly newsletter dedicated to competition (subscription required). Find out more about POLITICO.