Source: United Kingdom – Executive Government & Departments
Lourenço Ventura and Emma Cochrane will join the CMA’s existing team and Richard Romney will take up his current Senior Legal Director role on a permanent basis.
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Richard, Emma and Lourenço will be responsible for leading legal teams across the CMA’s portfolio of work – Richard for mergers, markets and regulatory appeals, Emma for consumer enforcement and Lourenço for competition enforcement, alongside the current Senior Legal Directors.
Following a highly successful interim promotion, Richard will take up the permanent position with immediate effect. Prior to joining the CMA’s Legal Service on temporary promotion in January 2023, Richard was a Director within the Mergers team, responsible for overseeing a range of high-profile merger cases. Richard originally joined the CMA in 2019 as a Senior Associate from Freshfields.
Emma will join the CMA from Linklaters, where she is a Counsel in the Antitrust & Foreign Investment Group. Emma has over ten years’ experience as a competition lawyer, including advising on cartel investigations, mergers and acquisitions, market investigations, abuse of a dominant position and other commercial agreements. Prior to Linklaters, Emma spent four years at Simmons and Simmons in the EU, Competition & Regulatory group.
Lourenço is returning to the CMA after spending the last two years working at the European Commission in Brussels. Previously, Lourenço spent ten years in various roles at the Office of Fair Trading – the CMA’s predecessor – and the CMA, most recently in the role of Legal Director. Before this, Lourenço spent 3 years at the Lisbon office of law firm Garrigues working on competition and EU law, commercial agreements, pharmaceutical and regulatory, and misdemeanour procedures.
Emma is joining the CMA in November and Lourenço will take up his post at the start of 2025.
Welcoming the appointments, Chris Prevett, General Counsel at the CMA said:
Sound, strategic legal risk management, and reaching robust legal decisions, underpins every aspect of the CMA’s work on behalf of UK consumers and businesses. With the CMA’s responsibilities set to grow following the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, I am really pleased to be making three appointments at this senior level.
Each of these senior appointments brings substantial expertise, and will add further strength and depth to the senior leadership team and high calibre lawyers and policy professionals comprising the CMA’s Legal Service.
This is a well-deserved promotion for Richard, reflecting his contribution to the CMA’s Legal Service, and I look forward to working with Emma and welcoming back Lourenço.
Notes to Editors
- For media enquiries, contact the CMA press office on 020 3738 6460 or press@cma.gov.uk