Legal Library: Search

In 2020, Danaher Corporation agreed to divest assets to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that its proposed $21.4 billion acquisition of General Electric’s biopharmaceutical business, GE Biopharma, would violate federal antitrust law. Sartorius Stedim Biotech S.A. is the approved divestiture buyer. Sartorius agreed to obtain the Commission’s prior approval if it proposed to acquire Novasep Process SAS’s chromatography equipment business. On Feb. 1, 2022, the Commission announced that it granted Sartorius’s petition to proceed with this acquisition.

The Federal Trade Commission issued an administrative complaint in August 2020 against a marketer, Traffic Jam Events, LLC, and its owner, David J. Jeansonne II (collectively, the "Respondents"), charging multiple counts of deceptive conduct. The administrative complaint mirrors a prior federal court complaint, which the Commission voluntarily dismissed to pursue a broader administrative proceeding.  On October 25, 2021, the Commission granted Complaint Counsel’s Motion for Summary Decision and ordered Respondents to cease and desist from such conduct for twenty years. 

The Federal Trade Commission is returning more than $3.7 million to consumers who lost money because of unfair and deceptive loan servicing practices by online lender Avant, LLC.

The FTC sued Avant in April 2019, alleging that the company falsely advertised that it would accept payments by credit or debit cards, when in fact it did not. This often resulted in customers being charged additional interest on their loans as they tried to arrange a different form of payment. The FTC also alleged that the company withdrew money from customers’ bank accounts or charged their credit cards without authorization, failed to properly and timely credit payments made by check, provided deceptive payoff quotes to customers, and tried to collect more money than the quoted payoff amount.

New York-based supermarket operators The Golub Corp., which owns the Price Chopper chain, and Tops Market Corp. have agreed to divest 12 Tops supermarkets to C&S Wholesale Grocers to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that their proposed merger would likely be anticompetitive in 11 local markets in New York and Vermont. In those markets, according to the complaint, without a remedy the merger is likely to allow the newly merged company to increase prices above competitive levels, unilaterally or by coordinating with competitors. The merger is also likely to diminish the combined company’s incentives to compete on quality and service in its stores. The Decision and Order requires Price Chopper and Tops to divest the 12 Tops stores and related assets to C&S on a rolling basis, beginning by Jan. 17, 2022, at a rate of two stores pe week for six weeks. On Jan. 24, 2022, the Commission announced the final consent agreement in this matter.