Federal Court ruling on Tabcorp-Tatts tie-up looms

The Federal Court is set to rule tomorrow on whether Tabcorp can go ahead with its $12bn merger with rival Tatts.

Tabcorp chairman Paula Dwyer in Melbourne. (Stuart McEvoy/The Australian)

A court will rule tomorrow on whether Tabcorp can go ahead with its $12bn merger with rival gambling giant Tatts, almost a year after the transaction was first proposed.

Despite fierce objections from corporate bookies including James Packer’s CrownBet, the deal was approved by the Competition Tribunal in June.

However, both the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and CrownBet asked the Full Federal Court to review the decision.

The ACCC’s appeal is based on chairman Rod Sims’ belief three points of law, which it relies internally on to make its own authorisation decisions, need to be clarified following the Competition Tribunal’s ruling.

Last month, Mr Sims said the ACCC accepted it needed to do more to convince courts and tribunals of its point of view — including gather more evidence, potentially blowing out merger timelines.

“It is clear that our current approach to merger review and litigation preparation is not resulting in adequately probative and persuasive evidence for the tribunal or Federal Court,” he said.

“This can be expected to increase the burden on the merger parties and the ACCC.”

CrownBet supports the ACCC’s position and claims the proposed merger would be bad for punters and competition.

Judges Anthony Besanko, Nye Perram and Alan Robertson will hand down their decision at 2.15pm tomorrow.