Jürgen Kühling is the chair of Germany’s Monopolies Commission. The following is a hopefully interesting excerpt from a recent interview he did with ProMarket (here).

When the Federal Cartel Office blocks a merger in Germany, the merging parties can seek an exemption from the minister of economic affairs to clear the merger. And we had a case three years ago where companies argued that the merger would lead to sustainable efficiencies that would benefit the economy as a whole in such magnitude that the efficiencies would outweigh the merger’s adverse effect on competition completely. We had concluded that the alleged environmental public benefits were either not demonstrated or ultimately represented self-serving benefits. In general, we think such sustainable benefits that are in the consumers’ interest can already be addressed under the current competition law. All sustainability aspects that consumers do not value lie outside the scope of competition law, in our view, and require regulation.

Kühling then provided some additional details:

As I mentioned before, there was a merger in 2019 that came under ministerial review, which we advised the ministry of economics on as well. After a substantial assessment, we concluded that the merger would not have any substantial positive impact on the development of new green products. Besides, the Federal Cartel Office concluded that this merger would lead to an adverse effect on competition and that considering efficiencies within the current merger control framework, there were no benefits for consumers. Yet, the economics minister argued that, when weighing the adverse effect on competition against the positive effect of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, there is an overall benefit for society, and therefore, the merger was granted ministerial approval.