EU antitrust regulators erred in clearing Broadcom's VMware deal, cloud industry lobby says

By Foo Yun Chee

BRUSSELS, Dec 11 (Reuters) - EU antitrust regulators failed to analyse properly the risks of Broadcom's AVGO.O $69 billion acquisition of cloud computing firm VMware before clearing the deal, the Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE) has told Europe's second-highest court.

CISPE, which has 46 members across Europe and both Microsoft MSFT.O and Amazon AMZN.O as associate members, in July challenged the European Commission's 2023 approval of the deal at the Luxembourg-based General Court.

"The Commission committed an error in law and manifest error of assessment as regards the impact of the transaction on competition on the market for server virtualisation software," CISPE said in its December 3 submission to the Court seen by Reuters.

The document said the EU competition watchdog's reasoning was flawed and cited warnings from customers and industry associations about the deal.

"By failing to assess the effects of the Transaction on the market for server virtualisation software, the Commission committed an error of law, breaching its obligations under the Merger Regulation and case-law," CISPE argued.

Broadcom has said it strongly disagreed with CISPE's allegations.

A Commission spokesperson said: "We have no specific comment. As always, we stand ready to defend our decisions in Court."

"This was a failure of oversight by the regulator with real-world costs for Europe's cloud sector and every organisation that depends upon it," said CISPE secretary general Francisco Mingorance.

(Reporting by Foo Yun Chee. Editing by Jane Merriman)

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