The European Commission has pushed back its deadline to rule on Liberty Global’s planned acquisition of Belgian mobile operator Base to March next year.
The Commission’s competition arm has extended its provisional deadline to issue a decision in the case until 3 March 2016, it announced on Wednesday.
The move comes just two days after the Commission revealed it will conduct an in-depth investigation into the proposed deal on the grounds that it could damage competition in the market. At the time it set a deadline of 18 February for a ruling, some 10 working days earlier than the new date.
It did not give a reason for the delay.
Liberty Global’s Belgian cable operation Telenet agreed to pay €1.33 billion in cash for Base, currently owned by KPN, in April.
Telenet has a presence in the mobile market through a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) deal, but the addition of Base will give it its own network and a much stronger mobile business. Telenet had 895,000 MVNO customers at the end of last year, compared with Base’s 3.3 million mobile subscribers.
The move is in line with a growing M&A trend in Europe and further afield, as operators seek to buy the new capabilities they need to become full service providers.
While a number of similar deals have been approved by the European Commission in the past couple of years, albeit with remedies attached, a change of personnel in Brussels appears to have brought with it a harder sta nce on competition.
New competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager blocked Telenor and TeliaSonera’s plans to merge in Denmark last month on the grounds that the market needs four mobile network operators to remain competitive.
Vestager insists that all proposed deals will be assessed on their own merits, but the Denmark decision has left other players involved in consolidation – including Telenet and Base – facing an uncertain future.
