The Queen’s Former Lawyer Is Now Helping Activision Fight The Blocked Merger In The UK

Both Activi­sion Bliz­zard and Microsoft have report­ed­ly hired high-pro­file lawyers to head their appeals for the recent deci­sion made by the UK’s Com­pe­ti­tion & Mar­kets Author­i­ty (CMA) to block their almost $70 bil­lion acquisition.

Accord­ing to The Finan­cial Times, Activi­sion Bliz­zard has hired Lord David Pan­nick KC, who has pre­vi­ous­ly rep­re­sent­ed Queen Eliz­a­beth II, Boris John­son, and Princess Diana. Pan­nick works for Black­stone Cham­bers, with some of his clients includ­ing the prime min­is­ter of the UAE and even the entire king­dom of Sau­di Ara­bia. His most recent case involved the for­mer prime min­is­ter Boris John­son and the min­is­ter’s “par­ty­gate” scandal.

Microsoft has retained the legal ser­vices of Daniel Beard KC of Mon­ck­ton Cham­bers, as report­ed by The Tele­graph. Beard has been described as a big name in the mar­ket of legal mat­ters per­tain­ing to com­pe­ti­tion, pub­lic pol­i­cy, and reg­u­la­to­ry issues.

The Finan­cial Times report­ed that Microsoft and Activi­sion Bliz­zard will file appeals inde­pen­dent­ly with­in the UK’s Com­pe­ti­tion Appeal Tribunal.

The CMA blocked Microsoft­’s pur­chase on April 26th, over con­cerns over the cloud gam­ing mar­ket. Microsoft Gam­ing CEO Phil Spencer has stat­ed the com­pa­ny does­n’t need to acquire Activi­sion Bliz­zard to move for­ward with its ambi­tions in the gam­ing mar­ket, but fin­ish­ing this deal would sim­ply speed this process up.

“The CMA deci­sion was dis­ap­point­ing. We’ve been talk­ing to that group for com­ing up on a year. They defined a mar­ket of cloud gam­ing that, in my mind, does­n’t real­ly exist yet today. But they have a point of view that maybe we have a lead in a mar­ket that is just form­ing and that this con­tent could some­how pro­hib­it oth­ers from com­pet­ing in that mar­ket,” Spencer said. “Activi­sion Bliz­zard King is not our strat­e­gy. But it is an accel­er­ant for our strategy.”