Jim Ratcliffe has accused the UK’s competition watchdog of being anti business after it blocked a deal by the British billionaire’s chemicals group Ineos Group Holdings SA.
(Bloomberg) — Jim Ratcliffe has accused the UK’s competition watchdog of being anti business after it blocked a deal by the British billionaire’s chemicals group Ineos Group Holdings SA.
Ratcliffe said the CMA’s decision earlier this year to intervene on Ineos’s acquisition of assets being sold by Swiss construction chemicals group Sika AG was “yet another example of a deal being stopped that would benefit the UK.”
“The CMA and UK government are becoming increasingly hostile to business,” Ratcliffe said in a statement on Tuesday.
Sika in March agreed to sell the admixtures business to UK private equity firm Cinven after the CMA flagged antitrust concerns around a deal with Ineos.
“We note that Ineos is one of only three major suppliers of a key product that Sika and its competitors rely on,” a spokesperson for the CMA said in an emailed statement.
The CMA has been increasing scrutiny of mergers and acquisitions it deems anticompetitive. The watchdog notably this year opted to block Microsoft Corp.’s $69 billion takeover of Activision Blizzard Inc. — set to be the biggest—ever gaming deal.
Lobby group TechUK, which counts Alphabet Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. among its members, later warned that the UK’s “expensive and awkward” regulation posed a threat to the country’s attractiveness to business.
Ratcliffe is worth $16.3 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. In his statement on Tuesday, he also took aim at the UK government’s decision last year to implement a windfall tax on oil and gas exploration and production companies in the North Sea, a levy that Ratcliffe called “ridiculous.”
“We are seeing a government that is driving business out of the UK,” Ratcliffe wrote. A representative for the UK business department didn’t immediately provide comment.
Ratcliffe is competing against a Qatari investor group to acquire English Premier League football club Manchester United Plc from the US Glazer family. Bloomberg News reported last month that the Qatar consortium was confident it would win the bidding war, with Ratcliffe’s proposal facing risks of legal action from minority investors in Manchester United.
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