The Illumina/Grail case and the importance of legal certainty in the European Merger Control system
The Court of Justice of the European Union ("CJEU") has issued an important judgment on 3 September 2024 in relation to the merger between Illumina Inc. - a biotech company specialising in genetic testing - and Grail LLC - a start-up developer of blood tests for cancer screening - ("Illumina/Grail"), which was prohibited by the European Commission by decision of September 2022
Apart from the debatable nature of the aforementioned prohibition decision - which gave rise to a sanctioning proceeding against Illumina, for having executed the operation without having been notified and authorised to the EC (an infringement known as "gun jumping") - the case has been particularly controversial because the aforementioned operation did not pass the notification threshold of the European merger control system, nor did it do so in any EU Member State. In other words, Illumina was under no obligation to notify the acquisition of Grail, prior to its implementation, either to the European Commission or to any national competition authority.
What happened then? We look at it in brief in this article.
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