Competition law

Der Zusammenschluss leads two lives, and this list needs the second. In ordinary German it is a coming-together: clubs, parishes or protest groups form one, and the word sounds cooperative, even warm. In merger control it is a defined term, and the definition reaches well beyond anything an English reader would call a merger. Buying all or a substantial part of another firm’s assets counts; so does acquiring control; so does taking a quarter of its shares or votes, although nothing has fused and both companies keep their names; so does any link that gives one firm a competitively significant influence over the other. That is why anmeldepflichtig and das Vollzugsverbot can bite on a minority stake. In a statute, read the word as the trigger for review, not as a description of two businesses becoming one.