Geoff Manne on the Amgen Settlement

Law360 – ICLE President Geoffrey Manne quoted in a Law360 story about Amgen’s settlement with the Federal Trade Commission regarding their planned purchase of Horizon Therapeutics. You can read full piece here.

But for all the fixes that come with the deal, one major critic of Khan’s FTC argues that it’s actually fairly limited. Geoffrey A. Manne, president and founder of the International Center for Law & Economics, which filed an amicus brief backing the companies, argued that unlike other deals where the FTC has negotiated a fairly broad prior approval provision covering a wide array of future mergers or even all future transactions for a 10-year period, the deal here only covers transactions scooping up potential treatments for the two diseases at issue.

“That’s a face-saving thing for the FTC,” Manne told Law360. “It’s a strong indication the FTC knew it had no bargaining power here, other than the cost of litigation.”