Introduction

Looking at the history of anti-trust laws, their first and possibly main objective seems to have been the forbidding of price collusion – that is, to prevent different sellers to agree in fixing the price of their product. For instance, the Sherman Act (1890) was, in its early period, generally interpreted as a law against cartels and moreover ‘in the enforcement of the Sherman Act against cartels, emphasis has been placed upon establishing the fact of an agreement pertaining to price’ (Posner, 1977, p. 213). The application of the Act to mergers came only later and was subject to controversy. Judges did not immediately use the argument that, by consolidation into a single-firm, cartel members could evade the law. As a result, following the Sherman Act, there was a sharp increase in the number of mergers in United States industry at the end of the nineteenth century as documented, among others, by Bittlingmayer (1985). More recently a similar evolution was observed in the European Community legislation. For years it had been discussed whether articles 85 and 86 of the Rome Treaty (1957), could have been directly applied to mergers and acquisitions. It was only in 1989 that a new regulation on such cases was adopted ‘in the 1992 perspective and given the corresponding wave of mergers and takeovers’.