Monitoring Trustee

François Dumonteil is a competition lawyer with a general management background, and has acted as monitoring trustee in more than thirty mandates since 2015. He founded ALFA Partners in 2023, after eight years in a previous practice where he led the Paris trustee services team; the mandates he held there transferred with him, and all thirteen listed above are held by ALFA Partners. There he was responsible for the French-jurisdiction mandates — before the Autorité de la concurrence and the New Caledonian and French Polynesian authorities — including the successive Canal+ matters: Vivendi / Groupe Canal+ / TPS and Vivendi / Groupe Canal+ / Direct 8 – Direct Star.

He came to trustee work from a decade in private practice: Senior Counsel at De Gaulle Fleurance & Associés, and before that nine years at Gide Loyrette Nouel — first in the Brussels office, then in the Economic Law department in Paris — on French and EU merger control and antitrust matters.

Admitted to the Paris Bar and currently non-practising, he holds a master's degree in international and European law from Université Panthéon-Assas (Paris II), where he was awarded the Francis Lefebvre prize in corporate law, and an MBA from HEC Paris. The second half of that training is the less usual one, and it is what a mandate tends to turn on: whether a divested business can stand on its own, whether a carve-out's systems and people actually work, whether a behavioural commitment survives contact with a sales force. Those are management questions before they are legal ones.

From 2019 to 2021 he served as Non-Governmental Advisor to the International Competition Network, appointed by the Competition Authority of New Caledonia, contributing to the merger and unilateral conduct working groups.

His analysis of early merger implementation under Article 7(3) of the EU Merger Regulation — a review of every decision since 2004 — was published in Concurrences in May 2024: Deciphering Article 7(3) — full article and summary deck available.