Rogers Gets Day in Court to Rescue Shaw Takeover

One of the biggest corporate mergers in Canada’s history is about to face its hardest test, as antitrust lawyers square off in court to decide the fate of a deal between two billionaire cable families.

Bloomberg reports it’s been a long haul for the Rogers family and Rogers Communications Inc. since they announced a takeover offer for Shaw Communications Inc. in March 2021. Executives from both companies confidently predicted they could steer the C$20 billion ($14.8 billion) transaction through regulators in a little more than a year.

They didn’t account for the doggedness of Matthew Boswell, Canada’s competition commissioner, who in May sued to block the deal, arguing it would make Rogers too powerful in the wireless industry. Several weeks later, the companies announced the sale of most of Shaw’s wireless business to Quebecor Inc.

But Boswell kept going. His office argues that even the divestiture of billions of dollars in Shaw assets isn’t enough to solve the inherent problem with the larger deal: it’s going to weaken the choices for Canadian consumers, potentially driving up costs for data connections just as 5G service is rolled out.

Hearings begin Monday at Canada’s Competition Tribunal, a body overseen by federal court judges that handles cases involving mergers and antitrust disputes. Boswell is seeking nothing less than to stop the deal entirely.

 
The companies say Boswell’s application to halt the transaction is excessive, given that they’ve already made a major concession to him with the Quebecor side deal.

“What you’re witnessing is a remarkably stubborn refusal by the commissioner to recognize reality,” Kent Thomson, a lawyer for Shaw, said at a pretrial conference on Nov. 1.