Germany wins allies in battle over cartel office

Date: 06/06/1996

By Tim Jones

GERMANY is prevailing in its argument in favour of stripping the European Commission of its merger-vetting powers and handing them over to a new independent agency, according to the head of the country's cartel office.

“I am quite confident that we will end up with an independent authority,” said Dieter Wolf, president of the Bundeskartellamt.

Responding to Competition Commissioner Karel Van Miert's outspoken rejection of the proposal, Wolf said it merely illustrated that the debate was moving his way.

“When I started drumming away at this campaign three years ago, people just smiled. Now, it's a more nervous reaction. That's progress,” he said in an interview with European Voice.

Van Miert argues that the plan for an independent office, suggested by Bonn at the Intergovernmental Conference, is intended to play to a domestic political audience increasingly sceptical about the Commission having too much power.

Bonn alleges that too many merger decisions have a political edge. But Wolf is keen to avoid pointing fingers of blame at individual Commissioners.

The Commission, he says, “has developed into a political body and political bodies cannot but produce political decisions”. Only when merger decisions are removed from its control will they be taken purely on legal grounds, he said.