Competition & Regulation

De Brauw has advised Royal Schiphol Group, a Dutch airport management company, on its joint venture with Lagardère Travel Retail, a France-based global travel retailer

De Brauw advised Inflexion, a leading European mid-market private equity firm, on its minority investment in Baker Tilly Netherlands, a leading accountancy and advisory firm. The investment is being made through Inflexion's dedicated minority fund and aims to support Baker Tilly Netherlands' growth plans in the region. Closing of the transaction is subject to clearance by the Dutch Authority for Consumers and Market (ACM) and advice from the works council. The parties are also in ongoing consultations with the Dutch Financial Markets Authority (AFM).

De Brauw advised Pon on the sale of its remaining sales, rental and service activities for Caterpillar construction equipment in the Netherlands and Norway to the German Zeppelin Group. In 2019, Pon already sold its Caterpillar activities in Denmark and Sweden to Zeppelin. Pon will continue to focus on mobility through its automotive and bikes activities.

Political influence over bank M&A in the EU is not new, but it has rarely been this visible. Over the past two years, three of Europe’s most consequential bank transactions have shown that commercial rationale, competition clearance and prudential approval alone may not determine a transaction’s prospects. Political feasibility can be equally decisive. Then Vice-President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Luis de Guindos, was blunt in a May 2026 exit interview: "Political interference eats away at the credibility of the Single Market message".

This is the July 2026 edition of our Competition Law in the Digital Age newsletter. Our quarterly publication provides insights on modern-day competition law developments in a bite-sized format.

Data centres have become foundational infrastructure for the global economy. The sector is attracting investment at a scale and pace without modern precedent. Accelerating digitalisation, the computational demands of AI, and the strategic priority that governments now attach to sovereign compute capacity have together transformed data centres into pillars of national industrial strategy. Yet the regulatory and infrastructure frameworks that govern their development have not kept pace with that demand. A defining feature of the sector is a collision between the political and economic imperative to build at speed on the one hand, and the physical and regulatory constraints on the other. Congested electricity grids, lengthening grid connection queues, inflexible planning regimes, tightening environmental obligations, and an increasingly assertive foreign investment-screening apparatus are factors that ultimately determine whether, where, when, and on what terms a project can in fact proceed.