Client Alert: FTC & DOJ Temporarily Suspend Practice of Granting HSR Act “Early Terminations”
Suspension expected to be “brief”
Date: February 4, 2021
The “early termination” of the HSR Act’s waiting period -- or “ET” in HSR Act parlance -- is commonly granted for HSR Act filings which pose no real antitrust or competitive concerns. The agencies cited “the transition to a new Administration” and the “unprecedented volume” of HSR Act filings received at the start of the fiscal year, as well as the “unprecedented times” posed by the COVID pandemic as reasons for suspending the grant of ET and reviewing ET procedures generally.
The FTC and DOJ said in a joint statement that they “anticipate that this temporary suspension will be brief.”
“We, as an agency and a country, are in unprecedented times, and our obligation is to be responsive to these circumstances, in this case by temporarily suspending early termination,” said Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, Acting FTC Chairwoman. “The law provides 30 days for the agencies to review the competitive implications of transactions. Given the confluence of an historically unprecedented volume of filings during a leadership transition amid a pandemic, we will presume we need those 30 days to ensure we are doing right by competition and consumers.”
The agencies implemented a similar temporary suspension of ET grants in March 2020 when it first introduced a COVID e-filing capability.
A copy of the agencies’ statement can be found here.
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