Ministers dismissed the president of the British competition regulator
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Ministers have sacked the chairman of the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority as the government seeks to scrap regulations as part of Labour’s growth agenda.
The government will announce the departure of Marcus Bokkerink as chairman of the regulator on Tuesday night following an intervention by business secretary Jonathan Reynolds, according to people familiar with the matter.
Bokkerink, a former managing director at the Boston Consulting Group, was appointed in 2022. CMA presidents can serve up to five years.
The Ministry of Business and Trade made it clear to Bokkerink on Monday night that it felt the regulator was not focused enough on growth, according to a government official.
The government has appointed Doug Gurr as the new interim chairman of the CMA. Gurr, the former head of Amazon UK, is currently director of the Natural History Museum in London.
Bokkerink was not immediately available for comment. The CMA and business department did not immediately comment.
The competition regulator has been at the center of complaints to labor ministers from business leaders, frustrated by what they see as an overly interventionist approach to business.
“We know that [the CMA’s] performance was not good enough. There’s a lot of frustration about that across the business,” said one government official. “We hear dissatisfaction from everyone.”
In 2023, the CMA came under heavy criticism from Microsoft due to the way the tech giant was acquired by Activision Blizzard. Agency eventually approved the job between two US-based companies after initially trying to block it.
In October last year, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer also targeted the body speech to business leaderstelling them that he would “make sure that every regulator in this country, especially our economic and competition regulators, take growth as seriously as this room does”.
Eleven members of the CMA’s 33-strong mergers committee, an independent panel of experts that decides whether any deal that could threaten competition can go ahead, are due to step down later this year. The Business Service is responsible for appointing their replacements.
One government official said it was reasonable to assume that more of the new commission members would have business experience.