Golf’s shock merger could face multiple legal challenges – Competition lawyer .full details below
Golf’s controversial new partnership is in for an “uncomfortable ride” and may face lengthy and costly legal challenges in multiple jurisdictions, a competition lawyer has said.
The PGA Tour announced last week it was creating a new commercial entity with the DP World Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF), a move it said would “unify golf” and which brought an end to a legal dispute between the PGA Tour and LIV Golf, a series backed by PIF.
Concerns have already been raised about whether the new deal may fall foul of competition law. The United States Senate has already opened an investigation into it, with Senator Richard Blumenthal writing to PGA Tour chief executive Jay Monahan to say that the PGA Tour’s “sudden and drastic reversal of position concerning LIV Golf” raised “serious questions”.
However, Andrew Evans, a partner at the law firm Irwin Mitchell, believes there are a number of hurdles for the new venture to overcome.
“Even though the structure for the PGA Tour/LIV merger is not known at present, competition law, or antitrust law as it is also known, tends to look at the economic impact of a merger regardless of the legal form it takes,” he told the PA news agency.
“So structuring the merger in a particular way, referring to it is a partnership etc will not hugely affect the analysis from a competition law perspective.”
In the United Kingdom mergers are the responsibility of the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), while, in the US, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Department of Justice (DoJ) are the bodies responsible.
