Earlier this week Reuters ran a piece suggesting that Vodafone’s proposed $21.8bn takeover of Liberty Global’s German and Eastern European assets will face a full EU antitrust investigation. This suggests a statutory step to approve a deal at the European level that would be refused at the German level. We suspect this deal is likely to be approved with minimum assurances and remedies from Vodafone. When a deal of this type was first mooted a few years back we said that it was unlikely to get approval. But after the European Commission approved the Liberty Global deal to acquire Ziggo in The Netherlands, and then another deal to merge that with Vodafone, there is suddenly nothing certain in European antitrust…