And so the Sony BMG merger saga continues. Now the higher court of the European Union has said its lower court failed to follow procedure when it ruled back in 2006 that the European Commission failed to follow procedure when it ruled on the 2004 proposed merger of Sony Corp and BMG's recorded music operations. You followed all that, right?
As you'll know, given that SonyBMG exists, the European Commission gave the go ahead for the merger of the two major record companies back in 2004, despite opposition from the independent music community. Pan-European indie label trade body IMPALA appealed the EC decision at the European Court Of First Instance, arguing that EC competition officials had not undertaken a thorough enough investigation into the implications of the merger before giving it its approval. In 2006 the European court ruled in IMPALA's favour, ordering EC competition officials to reconsider the original merger proposals, and setting out some guidelines as to how they should do that. The Commission did just that, and decided that, even having undertaken more detailed investigations into the merger, that it should still go ahead. IMPALA have appealed that second approval too.
Meanwhile, SonyBMG appealed the 2006 court ruling through the higher European Court Of Justice, and they this week said the First Instance court overstepped the mark in annulling the 2004 merger approval, saying they failed to consider the whole case, and gave too much credence to submissions by IMPALA which were confidential and could therefore not be seen by the defence - ie the Commission.
I'm not sure what any of this really means, given that SonyBMG still exists, and that its merger was re-approved even after the Commission considered it all for a second time. It will, however, possibly impact on IMPALA's appeal of that second EC approval.
In a statement, the higher court said yesterday that the lower court was wrong to "rely on documents submitted by IMPALA on a confidential basis, since the Commission itself could not have used them for the purposes of adopting a decision, by reason of their confidential nature".