UK Public M&A Monthly Activity Update: May 2026

May 2026 Updates:

Draft revised EU merger guidelines published

The EU Commission has published for consultation its long-awaited draft revised EU merger guidelines. This is the first update since the original guidelines were adopted more than two decades ago.

While they are still in draft form, and open for consultation (until 26 June 2026), they show the direction of travel, and the Commission is already taking them into account.

The draft guidelines recognise that the approach to balancing the different possible effects of a merger needs to be re-examined and “should give adequate weight to scale, innovation, investment and resilience as procompetitive factors that can benefit from a degree of consolidation and should assess the effect on future innovation potential”.

They do not however abandon rigorous vetting of deals. They give greater scope for merger parties to justify their transactions but also add new enforcement tools for the Commission. Innovation, resilience and scale can be used to justify, but also to oppose, a proposed merger.

For more information on the draft guidelines, see this post on our Competition Notes blog.

Miscellaneous amendments to the UKLRs

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has published Handbook Notice 140, which confirms a number of changes to the UK Listing Rules (UKLRs).

The rule changes, which follow consultations in Quarterly Consultation Paper No. 51 (CP26/8) (see our blog post here) and Quarterly Consultation Paper 50 (CP25/35) (see our blog post here), came into force on 24 April 2026.

The changes include:

• confirmation that the information that has to be disclosed on a significant transaction can be included in a shareholder circular; and
• the addition of guidance to make it clear that, on a related party transaction, the sponsor may take into account, but not rely on, the directors’ commercial assessments, and that the requirement to make a supplementary notification in the event of a material change ends when the transaction completes.