Published on Apr 16, 2026
The EU’s upcoming merger guidelines will not be a blank check for dealmakers, and the European Commission won’t approve deals based on companies’ “wishful thinking,” the top EU official in charge of merger control told The Capitol Forum. Earlier discussions of a merger’s benefits and drawbacks can be helpful, as is assessing those benefits over longer time horizons, […]
The EU’s upcoming merger guidelines will not be a blank check for dealmakers, and the European Commission won’t approve deals based on companies’ “wishful thinking,” the top EU official in charge of merger control told The Capitol Forum.
Earlier discussions of a merger’s benefits and drawbacks can be helpful, as is assessing those benefits over longer time horizons, but “it is not to say everything is going to be accepted – on the contrary,” Executive Vice- President Teresa Ribera said in an interview. Proof of a deal’s benefits, she added, “needs to be sufficiently robust.”
“The most important thing to me is that … we take into consideration longer timeframes to assess [deals], and the second most important thing is that this is not a blank check,” Ribera said. The commission, she said, won’t take “any kind of naïve approach” in which “everything can be accepted – that’s not the case.”
The commission’s rewrite of the merger guidelines, due imminently, has drawn a fierce lobbying campaign from businesses eager to see the competition watchdog’s rules relaxed, with industry arguing the enforcer should allow European firms to scale up and become “champions” that can compete with U.S. and Chinese counterparts.
Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, with whom Ribera has clashed on issues from foreign conflicts to deregulation, has said the forthcoming guidelines would “reflect the realities of the global market, not just the European one,” and “enable the emergence of true European champions.”
Ribera, however, said in the interview Thursday that such “champions’” main problem is not the merger rules, but fragmentation within the bloc, “so this needs to go hand in hand with market integration, which is also part of the mandate of this commission.”
Her comments echo other competition officials who warn that differing regulatory regimes between EU member states are holding European companies back from scaling up across borders – not competition policy. That’s also a point former European Central Bank President Mario Draghi emphasized in his landmark 2024 report on European competitiveness.
In the telecommunications sector, for example, providers are facing 27 different markets, Ribera said, suggesting there should be a deadline for those markets to harmonize. The commission earlier this year proposed a regulation to help harmonize telecom rules across the EU, but it’s facing pushback from member states wary of giving up authority over the sector.
Ribera affirmed widespread expectations that the guidelines will shift talk of merging companies’ claims of the deal’s efficiencies, or economic benefits, much earlier in the process. That’s a change sought by telecom firms and others that argue officials should give more weight to the investments they’d be able to make in the latest technologies if permitted to scale up.
Still, any benefit claim “needs to be proven, so it’s not just wishful thinking that we will accept [them],” Ribera said. The commission has many other factors to weigh when reviewing a deal, she added.
The enforcer will try “to prevent killer acquisitions,” and assess the impact of a merger on the environment, consumer prices and the risk of future abuses, and the enforcer’s job is “not to accept whatever,” she said.
Big Tech rules. Besides heading the merger control revamp, Ribera is also one of the top commission officials responsible for enforcing the EU’s digital rules, specifically those based on past antitrust cases against large – mostly American – technology companies. Any action against U.S. tech giants risks further straining the bloc’s relationship with Washington, but Ribera noted that Donald Trump himself could be a beneficiary of the Digital Markets Act.
Without naming it, she referenced Trump’s Truth Social, which is operated by Trump Media & Technology Group (DJT), which is majority-owned by the American president. A nonprofit led by a Trump ally filed a complaint against Meta (META) last year, alleging the latter violated the DMA by unfairly promoting Threads on Instagram, to the detriment of Truth Social.
Trump’s ownership of “a small digital company,” Ribera said, “shows the extent to which there may be many different small digital companies willing to thrive, and who’d like to enjoy the opportunity to challenge the big ones.”
She noted that U.S. courts are forcing tech giants like Google (GOOG) and Apple (AAPL) to make changes similar to those required by the DMA. When it comes to forcing the two companies to allow app developers to steer customers to offers outside of the App Store and Google Play store, so that they can dodge some fees from the mobile operating system duopolists, private litigation from Fortnite maker Epic Games has pushed the U.S. ahead of the EU.
The commission fined Apple €500 million for such “steering” restrictions in breach of the DMA about a year ago, but hasn’t decided whether to further penalize the company or accept changes Apple proposed in June last year. The commission’s final decision in a DMA case targeting similar conduct by Google is over a year behind the best-endeavor deadline.
The commission recently confirmed it was seeking a “dialogue” with the U.S. on the EU’s digital rules, alarming proponents of stronger enforcement who fear political meddling.
While Ribera said such discussions are generally helpful, she told The Capitol Forum that she did not meet with FTC Chair and frequent EU critic Andrew Ferguson while in Washington late last month, and warned U.S. officials against trying to intervene in the bloc’s enforcement of its own laws.
“What doesn’t seem reasonable is to hear messages trying to impose what our parliament, our regulators should be doing or how we should forget about the compliance with the law because there is an American company behind – that doesn’t make sense,” she said. “And it could not make sense the other way around.”
