Patrick Leahy: “last Thursday, the Senate passed the Hatch-Leahy-DeWine-Kohl substitute amendment to S. 1854, the ``Hart-Scott-Rodino…”

“last Thursday, the Senate passed the Hatch-Leahy-DeWine-Kohl substitute amendment to S. 1854, the ``Hart-Scott-Rodino Antitrust Improvements Act,'' that will make significant improvements to this important antitrust law. Section 7 of the Clayton Act, as amended by the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act of 1976 (HSR), requires companies that plan to merge to notify the Justice Department's Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission of their intention and submit certain information. HSR pre-merger notifications provide advance notice of potentially anti-competitive transactions and allow the antitrust agencies to block mergers before they are consummated, which is easier than undoing them after-the-fact. Since passage of the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, this law has worked well to help the American economy flourish, despite larger and more complex mergers and consolidations within and among different industries. The Hatch-Leahy-DeWine-Kohl substitute amendment to S. 1854, the ``Hart-Scott-Rodino (HSR) Antitrust Improvements Act,'' will update this law and make it work even better. Specifically, the substitute would raise the minimum threshold for the ``size of the transaction'' required to provide HSR notifications from $15,000,000 to $50,000,000.”