Assistant Director, Merger Remedies

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is the UKs principal competition and consumer protection authority. We promote competition and protect consumers with a clear end goal in mind: to drive economic growth and improve household prosperity. The CMA has a range of powers, which it uses to undertake a wide variety of cutting-edge, high profile and complex work, spanning merger and market inquiries, competition and consumer law enforcement, our role in the digital markets competition regime, subsidy advice, and internal market advice.

You can read more about the CMA in our candidate pack.

The Merger Remedies and Financial Analysis (MRFA) team sits within the wider CMA Mergers directorate and provides CMA decision-makers with business and financial analysis across a range of issues arising in our merger investigations, including undertaking assessments of complex counterfactual scenarios; leading on the development, implementation, monitoring, enforcement and reviews of the remedies we impose; and imposing and monitoring the CMAs interim measures during our merger investigations.

MRFA team responsibilities

Working closely together with CMA colleagues in multi-disciplinary project teams, you will investigate, analyse and advise upon financial and/or business issues across a range of CMA mergers cases. You will be responsible for delivering and explaining analysis that informs the CMAs understanding of how businesses and markets are operating, and in the event that it is necessary to intervene, you will play a central role in finding and implementing effective, real-world solutions to the problems we find.

In addition to casework, as part of the Mergers management team you will be involved in shaping the CMAs mergers policy and practice. You will help to address the challenges raised by novel substantive and procedural issues in UK merger control, including those raised by mergers in digital markets and multi-jurisdictional cases.

As the lead MRFA adviser across a range of cases, you will be responsible for providing high quality and timely commercial and financial analysis to support key decisions on the CMAs merger cases.

Your exact responsibilities will vary depending on the specifics of the case, but will typically include:

• Developing merger remedies: Where we find that a merger the CMA is investigating gives rise to competition concerns, you will lead the identification and development of effective and proportionate remedies that will address the competition concerns, improving consumer outcomes. You will also often be responsible for implementing these interventions in practice, for example negotiating undertakings with firms or working with legal colleagues to draft orders.
• Leading and managing: When implementing remedies, monitoring remedies or taking enforcement action, you will lead, motivate, and manage multi-disciplinary professional teams, including setting stretching but achievable deadlines and priorities and fostering effective and collaborative team working. You will support MRFA Directors in leading those cases (often several at any one time), and to ensure that they are managed and delivered in a timely and effective way and to a high quality. You will promote the robustness of the merger control process and ensure that all decisions are clear, accurate, well-reasoned and evidence based.
• Commercial and financial analysis: You will be responsible for identifying the key commercial and financial issues for assessment. You will gather relevant information, analyse and advise upon the implications of a broad range of commercial issues as they relate to the firms we investigate. This may include: assessing a firms financial performance; analysing a firms corporate finance decisions and options; or looking at a firms strategic business choices such as entering or exiting a market. Where we commission external consultants and advisers on technical and business issues, you will supervise this process, ensuring that their input contributes effectively to your case and is delivered within agreed timelines.
• Supporting case teams with interim measures: You will help advise case teams on the steps required to hold separate the merger parties while our merger investigation is ongoing and where necessary, to prevent or unwind pre-emptive action to protect against actions that may prejudice the outcome of the CMAs merger investigation or impede the taking of any appropriate remedial action (e.g. where the merger parties change the pre-merger competitive structure of the market during the CMAs investigation).
• Remedies monitoring and enforcement: Once a merger remedy has been implemented, we monitor merger parties compliance with them and take enforcement action where there has been a breach. You will play a leading role in ensuring compliance with the CMAs merger remedies, analysing potential breaches or compliance issues, and making recommendations for potential enforcement actions where a breach has been identified.
• Remedy reviews and evaluations: The CMA has a statutory duty to keep under review merger remedy undertakings and orders. In discharging this duty, you will help the MRFA team consider whether, by reason of any change of circumstances, undertakings are no longer appropriate and need to be varied, superseded or released; and an order is no longer appropriate and needs to be varied or revoked. You will also seek to support the evaluation of past remedies and feed lessons into future design.
• Communicating: Through presentations and written reports, communicating the work that you have undertaken, your findings and the implications for the wider case. Audiences will include senior decision makers, other colleagues, and a wide range of external stakeholders.
• Stakeholder management: You will develop and maintain open, professional, and proactive engagement with internal stakeholders and merger parties and other external stakeholders, often at very senior levels.
• Team working: You will be a committed member of the multi-disciplinary case team, working collaboratively and contributing to wider work and discussions in order to help inform conclusions beyond your own workstreams.
• Quality assurance: You will ensure that analysis is well thought through and accurate through review and development of audit trails, including review of work by junior colleagues.

You are likely to have management responsibilities which involve overseeing and guiding less experienced team members on cases, as well as providing feedback and coaching to support their personal and professional development. While the role initially may have no direct line management responsibilities there will be opportunities over time to line manage colleagues at more junior levels.

You will also be involved in corporate contributions such as providing advice and input to projects that seek to improve the CMAs impact as a whole (e.g. risk monitoring, improving processes, promoting inclusion and diversity).