EU offers more than red tape on 50th birthday

The navel-gazing about the EU that has accompanied its decidedly low-key 50th anniversary celebrations reminds me of the gag in the film Monty Python's Life Of Brian asking "what have the Romans ever done for us?".

For a decidedly more upbeat diagnosis of the state of the union, you could do worse than revisit an opinion piece Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer senior partner Guy Morton penned for Legal Week last October (see article) in which he praised the European Commission’s (EC’s) efforts to remove the barriers to cross-border M&A in Europe.

In the Dealmaker column in this week’s issue, Jeremy Hoyland, the head of Simmons & Simmons’ financial markets practice, revisits Morton’s theme by identifying the development of the European financial markets over the next 12 months as the most significant market trend in his practice area.

"Can Europe really challenge the dominance of the US market?" he asks.

Elsewhere in the same issue, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton Milan partners Roberto Casati and Roberto Bonsignore go out of their way to credit the EC for its role in fostering an unusually high level of Italian M&A activity in the politically sensitive areas of banking and energy (see article).

Writing in the M&A and Corporate Legal Developments Focus, they highlight a regulatory shift away from the Bank of Italy to the Italian Antitrust Authority. They add: "By enforcing European Union rules on the freedom of establishment and movement of capital across Europe, the EC is perceived increasingly by market players as a key factor in facilitating M&A… as opposed to just representing a regulatory hurdle in the process due to its competition clearance function."

High praise indeed for an organisation that spends most of its time being used as a political punchbag.