Broadcom loses court bid to suspend EU antitrust request for US legal papers

By Foo Yun Chee

BRUSSELS, Aug 3 (Reuters) - Broadcom on Monday lost its bid to suspend a European Union antitrust request for U.S. legal documents protected by U.S. legal professional privilege in a case related to VMware, which it acquired in 2023, after an EU court sided with EU regulators.

The U.S. chipmaker in May asked the Luxembourg-based General Court for an interim measure against the European Commission, which acts as the EU competition enforcer, after it was hit with a demand to present documents produced outside the EU.

It said the request went against U.S. attorney-client privilege, which protects confidential communications between lawyers and their clients. In the EU, this status covers only communications between a company and its external lawyers but not in-house lawyers.

The General Court, Europe's second-highest, rejected Broadcom's arguments.

"It is for the Commission to decide whether a particular item of information is necessary to enable it to bring to light an infringement of the EU competition rules," the judge said.

"If the undertaking under investigation was itself able to decide which documents are, in its view, relevant for the purposes of that investigation, that would seriously undermine the Commission's powers of investigation," they said.

(Reporting by Foo Yun CheeEditing by Tomasz Janowski)