Expertise

Al is a Partner in Addleshaw Goddard's Competition practice. He has over 15 years of experience advising on complex competition, merger control, State aid and "antitrust-led regulation", including client secondments at RBS (twice), Sainsbury's and BP.  He has particular expertise in regulated sectors (including financial services/payments, energy, transport, telecoms and healthcare) as well as retail and consumer.  He previously trained as an economist and spent time with DG Competition at the European Commission (EC),

Al's recent credentials include:

• Merger control: Unconditional Phase 1 clearances from the EC in Inflexion/ICG/Marston and Macquarie/KCOM, representing the seller (and, post-completion, Bennetts) in Ardonagh/Bennetts before the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and acting for the Department for Transport on the merger control aspects of the West Coast Partnership / HS2 award.
• Antitrust: Advising an insurer in the CMA's investigation into Compare the Market's use of most favoured nation clauses, advising on five of the CMA's pharmaceutical investigations and leading a significant internal investigation for a major utility provider, successfully persuading the competition authority to deprioritise the case.  
• Market studies and investigations: Advising on the CMA's market investigations in groceries, private motor insurance and retail banking, as well as its market study in digital comparison tools and studies by the Payment Systems Regulator (PSR) studies into payments infrastructure, contactless mobile payments and merchant acquiring.
• Subsidy control and state aid: Acting for one of the largest lenders in Southern Europe on the state aid implications of its restructuring package, a clearing bank on the state aid implications of the Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme and a major industrial on the subsidy control aspects of a state recapitalisation worth nearly £0.5bn.
• National Security and Investment Bill (NSIB): Leading the firms' working group on the implementation of the NSIB, including acting on over a dozen live deals for which the NSIB is an active issue.
• Al has particular expertise in payment systems and sits on AG's cross-divisional payments team. He has advised eight major payments institutions on the impact of the interchange regulation, acted on the European Commission's antitrust investigation into SEPA e-payments (which preceded PSD2) and regularly acts for clients on PSR-related investigations and reviews.