Attorneys representing the Federal Trade Commission and supermarket chains Kroger and Albertsons are set to make their closing arguments Tuesday, bringing to a close the three-week-long trial during which the regulatory agency made its case to halt the companies' plan to merge.
Both sides will present their final remarks Tuesday morning in a Portland, Oregon, federal courtroom before Judge Adrienne Nelson, who will decide whether or not to grant the FTC’s request for a preliminary injunction.
Granting the injunction would present Kroger with a daunting appeals process. Many companies placed in this position in the past have elected to abandon their merger plans, according to legal experts. It’s unclear at this point when Nelson will issue her ruling.
During the hearing, the two sides focused on the main points outlined in the months before the court case began, according to news outlets that closely followed the legal proceedings. The FTC has said the merger would create a grocery giant that would offer no tangible benefits for consumers, be bad for workers and saddle C&S Wholesale Grocers with hundreds of divested stores that it’s unfit to run. Lawyers for Kroger and Albertsons, on the other hand, have argued that the merger would result in lower prices for consumers, preserve union jobs and ultimately create a supermarket entity capable of competing more effectively with large rivals like Walmart and Amazon.
Still, there have been a few surprises, such as the FTC’s accusation that Albertsons executives deleted text messages related to the proposed merger. Albertsons CEO Vivek Sankaran also raised eyebrows when he said that a failure to merge would be dire for the grocery chain he helms, possibly resulting in store closures and exits from geographic markets, according to reporting by The Cincinnati Enquirer.
As one court challenge to the Kroger-Albertsons deal draws to a close, another is just getting started. In a Seattle courtroom on Monday, lawyers representing Washington state made their opening arguments in a trial that seeks to block the merger. That case stems from a lawsuit that the state’s attorney general, Bob Ferguson, filed in January, and that a state judge upheld in April after Kroger tried to dismiss the suit.
The legal teams for Kroger and Albertsons will have to defend the merger in court a third time starting Sept. 30, when another trial challenging the deal is set to get underway in Colorado.
