Oracle is braced for a formal objection from Brussels to its planned $7.4bn (£4.5bn) acquisition of fellow US technology company Sun Microsystems, escalating the company's legal wrangle with Europe's competition authorities.
The US software company has refused to offer any concessions to European regulators to meet their concerns about the deal, according to one person close to the process. That has left Brussels close to issuing an official statement of objections, the first step on the path to blocking it, this person added.
The complaint could come within days, but there is still a chance that one side or the other will back down, according to observers in Brussels. Neither side commented yesterday.
Some suggest that Oracle has little to lose by waiting to see Brussels' precise concerns. It would then still have time to offer concessions or try to mount a legal fight, though this would inevitably be prolonged.
The European Commission last blocked a US merger when it intervened in General Electric's proposed purchase of Honeywell in 2001, causing a transatlantic row. Since then, regulators in Washington and Brussels have tried to co-ordinate their work more closely to avoid such disagreements.
The Commission rarely blocks deals outright. Between 2004 and 2008, only two of the 1,665 deals notified have been barred.
The Sun acquisition has already been cleared by the US Department of Justice, in spite of the agency's heightened attention under the Obama administration to antitrust issues, particularly in the technology industry.
The EC first raised its concerns about the Sun acquisition two months ago, preventing Oracle from completing the deal. Since then Sun has said it will lay off 3,000 people, attributing the timing of that decision to the delay in Brussels.
Brussels' concerns centre on Oracle's assumption of MySQL, an open source software company that Sun acquired in 2008.
