If you’ve been following Microsoft’s takeover of Activision Blizzard King from day one, you already know that it all resulted in a new hearing in the UK Court of Appeal. Microsoft’s appeal has been received and will be discussed very soon in July.
The hearing will take place in the last half of June, obtaining a deadline of 24 to 31 for all the relevant sessions to be held. According to the court, it is likely that not all of these days will be taken for statements, so this may be a shorter hearing than expected. Even so, they encourage both parties involved to prepare, as this will not be a process to be taken lightly.
The hearing on the merits of this lawsuit will take place in the fortnight which begins on July 24, that is to say the weeks which begin on July 24 and 31,” Judge Marcus Smith said.
I don’t expect it to take all those 10 days, but I’d like to see the games fail on the side of longer rather than shorter oral presentations. It seems to me that this is an excess that we can afford.
A battle of eras: Microsoft and the CMA prepare for their first hearing
According to collect VGC, the plans of the counterparts are, of course, completely opposite. Although Microsoft wants the whole procedure to happen as quickly as possible, the CMA has asked that it be postponed to a later date. The Court rejected both requests and decided to execute them at a later date, but not immediately. With this, they seek to ensure that both parties have time to prepare their arguments without pressuring one or the other.
There is a tendency, and it is motivated more by the Court than by the parties, to make submissions shorter than perhaps they should be. I want to do the opposite in this case. I want the parties to understand that we will want to give them every opportunity to sort out the difficulties of this case during oral presentations and that we have the time to do so.
In this way, we will have to prepare for everything that comes out in this period from July 24 to July 31, because there will be a lot of interesting information regarding the interests of the CMA and its objective to block the agreement. Remember that this is a control body that seems to have reinforced Sony’s fight to block an economic agreement that favors many companies and “harms” only one.
Meanwhile, we continue to celebrate that there are more market regulators in the world that approve the purchase, as was the case in Korea these days, the most important, the United Kingdom and the States States, yet to be defined.
