As avid readers of social media, Politico, Chillin Competition and other places will know, I left the Commission at the end of February. On 4 April I joined Covington’s growing competition team in Brussels.
I will continue to write on this blog – though experience has taught me to make no promises as to whether I will write more or less often than before.
What I write about will change. I tend to write about something I have been involved in, even if only to discuss it, rather than something I’ve merely read about happening elsewhere. So in private practice I’ll have different discussions than I had in the Commission and I hope those discussions will generate new perspectives.
If I disagree with the Commission, I’ll say so. But I already did, even when I was still in the Commission. The Commission has extremely generous rules on publications by staff which mean that already on this blog I criticised a merger decision that was – I think – right in terms of the outcome but poor in terms of reasoning.
So don’t expect to see an enormous change. I’m not going to start writing that the Commission is an out of control institution and many aspects of competition enforcement are flawed. Because I don’t believe either to be true. I worked hard in the Commission to get to what I thought was the right outcome on cases, policies and procedures, and I worked with a lot of other people trying to do the same.