Your commercial news round-up: crypto litigation, Morrisons, BMW, Heathrow Airport, DASH

Reading time: four minutes

With training contract application season well underway, it’s crucial that those of you applying are consistently considering how your shortlisted firms and their clients might be impacted by various internal and external factors, big and small. There are lots of interesting updates to dig your teeth into in this week’s round-up, including action from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), million-pound acquisitions, advertising compliance issues and more.

• Lawyers are preparing for a surge in litigation following an enormous collapse in the value of crypto as investors try to “recoup some of their losses”. The collapse is likely to result in a number of misselling claims from UK investors who believe they’ve lost out on considerable amounts of money having been mis-sold cryptocurrencies. The claims may crop up where cryptocurrencies were deemed a low-risk investment before facing a significant decline in value. RPC’s Dan Wyatt, a litigation partner at the firm, also spoke about potential claims around mismanagement of cryptocurrency portfolios by financial advisers, as well as disputed margin calls, according to CITY A.M.

• The CMA has announced that it’s launching an investigation into Morrisons’ planned acquisition of McColl’s Retail Group, after the supermarket chain agreed to purchase the group in a rescue deal worth £190 million back in May. Following an initial enforcement order, the CMA is now due to launch a formal phase one probe and “invites comments on the transaction from any interested party”. The investigation will consider “whether the creation of that situation may be expected to result in a substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets in the United Kingdom for goods or services”.

Meanwhile, in other acquisition news this week, Wagamama owner the Restaurant Group has bought Mexican food chain Barburrito in a £7 million deal. The Restaurant Group said that Barburrito’s offering was “well aligned with key consumer trends including healthy eating, convenience, customisable cuisine”, with the Mexican chain providing high-quality products at “attractive prices”. For the period ended 26 September 2021, Barburrito’s profit before tax was £1.7 million, while gross assets hit £3.9 million.

• German car manufacturer BMW is facing criticism for introducing a paywall that limits drivers’ use of some of its cars’ hardware features, including heated seats. The manufacturer has been called “greedy and exploitative” given that most other manufacturers include these features as standard in their modern vehicles. Drivers in the UK can expect to pay £15 a month to use the installed system to heat a front seat or £150 for a year, £250 for three years or £350 for perpetuity. BMW will continue to install these features during production with the paywall for its ConnectedDrive features impacting customers in countries including the UK, South Africa and Germany. A spokesperson for BMW explained that the "ConnectedDrive Store offers customers the opportunity to add selected features, which they did not order when the vehicle was built, at a later date”.

• Heathrow Airport has imposed a daily cap on passenger numbers and has warned airlines to stop selling summer tickets as it continues to face difficulties responding to the rebound in air travel. The airport’s cap of 100,000 daily passengers came into effect earlier this week and will last until 11 September. With passenger numbers having regularly exceeded 100,000 at Heathrow, John Holland-Kaye, the airport’s chief executive, said the high volume results in “periods when service drops to a level that is not acceptable”, including delays, last-minute cancellations and baggage not making it on to flights. The introduction of the cap aims to “protect flights for the vast majority of passengers at Heathrow this summer”; however, it’s also expected that “some summer journeys will either be moved to another day, another airport or be cancelled”.

• Transport for London (TFL) has “rejected” sparkling water brand DASH’s wonky aubergine ad for not complying with its advertising policy and asked the company to tone down its provocative underground poster, according to the Evening Standard. The advert has been accused of not meeting Clause 2.3c of TFL’s advertising policy which states that an advertisement will be unacceptable if it “could reasonably be seen as distasteful, indecent or obscene, in its use of imagery, language or otherwise”.

Check the News every Thursday for this weekly commercial news round-up.

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