BRUSSELS, Dec 11 (Reuters) – EU antitrust regulators failed to analyse properly the risks of Broadcom’s $69 billion acquisition of cloud computing firm VMware before clearing the deal, the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) has informed Europe’s second-highest court.
CISPE, which has 46 members across Europe and both Microsoft and Amazon as associate members, in July challenged the European Commission’s 2023 approval of the deal at the Luxembourg-based General Court.
“The Commission committed an error in law and manifest error of assessment as regards the impact of the transaction on competition on the market for server virtualisation software,” CISPE declared in its December 3 submission to the Court seen by Reuters.
The document declared the EU competition watchdog’s reasoning was flawed and cited warnings from customers and indusattempt associations about the deal.
“By failing to assess the effects of the Transaction on the market for server virtualisation software, the Commission committed an error of law, breaching its obligations under the Merger Regulation and case-law,” CISPE argued.
Broadcom has declared it strongly disagreed with CISPE’s allegations.
A Commission spokesperson declared: “We have no specific comment. As always, we stand ready to defconclude our decisions in Court.”
“This was a failure of oversight by the regulator with real-world costs for Europe’s cloud sector and every organisation that depconcludes upon it,” declared CISPE secretary general Francisco Mingorance.
(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee. Editing by Jane Merriman)
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