ExxonMobil’s Acquisition of Pioneer Natural Resources

7 Apr

Abstract

ExxonMobil’s $64.5 billion all-stock acquisition of Pioneer Natural Resources, the largest energy-sector merger of the twenty-first century, closed on May 3, 2024, conditionally cleared by the Federal Trade Commission subject to a behavioral consent order of unprecedented legal construction, one reversed in its entirety by a unanimous Commission seven months later. This article advances a precise argument. The FTC’s concern that a US oil executive who allegedly coordinated domestic production with OPEC+ supply decisions should not govern the world’s largest non-government-owned publicly traded oil company was not unreasonable under competition policy. The error was institutional and statutory: Section 7 of the Clayton Act is a structural instrument designed to address market concentration, not a behavioral instrument designed to remedy individual executive conduct. That error produced three simultaneous structural failures: a mismatch between Clayton Act doctrine and globally integrated commodity markets, the structural immunisation of OPEC-aligned executive conduct from every instrument of US law, and a strategic miscalculation that has left the underlying problem more visible and less addressable than before.

Deal Overview

Acquirer: ExxonMobil Corporation (NYSE: XOM), Spring, Texas.
Target: Pioneer Natural Resources Company (NYSE: PXD), Irving, Texas.
Enterprise value: $64.5 billion ($59.5B equity; $5B net debt assumed).
Structure: All-stock; 2.3234 ExxonMobil shares per Pioneer share (~$253/share).
Formally signed: October 10, 2023.
FTC conditional clearance: May 2, 2024. Closed: May 3, 2024.
Legal counsel: Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP (ExxonMobil); Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP (Pioneer).
Scale: Ninth largest corporate transaction in recorded history.

The transaction combined ExxonMobil’s existing ~570,000 net Permian acres with Pioneer’s 850,000 contiguous Midland Basin acres, yielding a consolidated resource base of approximately 16 billion BOE with a 15-to-20-year drilling inventory. At a federal funds rate of 5.25%, debt-financing a $64.5 billion acquisition would have generated approximately $3.4 billion in annual interest costs, a sum equivalent to the deal's entire projected synergy run-rate, rendering the all-stock structure the only viable financial architecture at that moment in the credit cycle. Announced four days after the October 7, 2023 outbreak of hostilities in Gaza, against a Brent crude price of approximately $86 per barrel sustained in part by Saudi Arabia’s OPEC+-coordinated production cuts, the transaction was priced against a supply environment whose precise dynamics would, within six months, become the legal theory deployed to conditionally block one of its terms, a conjunction whose analytical significance is addressed in Part IV.

Company Details: Acquirer

ExxonMobil is the direct corporate successor to two of the principal entities produced by the Supreme Court's 1911 dissolution of the Standard Oil Trust: Standard Oil of New Jersey, which became Exxon Corporation, and Standard Oil of New York, which became Mobil Corporation, the two having merged on November 30, 1999 to form ExxonMobil. The FTC invoked this Standard Oil lineage in Chair Khan's statement to situate the transaction within a historical arc of monopolization, a rhetorical framing the dissenting commissioners correctly identified as carrying no operative bearing on the Section 7 analysis. Under CEO Darren Woods, who assumed the role in 2017, ExxonMobil has pursued a fossil-fuel-centered strategy that stands in deliberate contrast to the diversification approach adopted by its European peers, a strategic orientation ExxonMobil has publicly and repeatedly articulated. With a Permian position producing roughly 600,000 BOE per day, the company entered this transaction from a position of structural strength.

The FTC invoked this Standard Oil lineage in its Statement of Commissioners to situate the transaction within a historical arc of monopolization, a rhetorical framing the dissenting commissioners correctly identified as carrying no operative bearing on the Section 7 analysis. Under CEO Darren Woods, who assumed the role in 2017, ExxonMobil has pursued a fossil-fuel-centered strategy that stands in deliberate contrast to the diversification approach of its European peers. With pre-merger total assets of approximately $376 billion and a Permian position producing roughly 600,000 BOE per day, the company entered this transaction from structural strength. The Pioneer acquisition was the clearest available expression of that strategy: a commitment, structured in equity, to the proposition that Tier 1 Permian acreage is a non-replicable, long-duration asset worth concentrating.

Company Details: Target

Pioneer was established in August 1997 through the merger of Parker & Parsley Petroleum Company and MESA Inc. and became the defining independent producer in the Midland Basin of the Permian. Its founding CEO, Scott D. Sheffield, led the industry lobby that secured repeal of the US crude oil export ban in 2015 and, during his second tenure as CEO from 2019, completed the acquisition of Parsley Energy for $4.5 billion in stock and the $6.4 billion acquisition of DoublePoint Energy, consolidating Pioneer's dominant Basin position. At the time of the transaction, Pioneer held over 850,000 net acres with proved reserves of 2.376 billion BOE and an operating cost of approximately $9 per barrel, among the lowest of any producer globally.

Three features of Pioneer's corporate position carry specific legal weight in the analysis that follows. The merger agreement required ExxonMobil to appoint Sheffield to its board upon closing, which became the singular focus of the FTC's regulatory intervention. Sheffield concurrently served as a director of The Williams Companies, a natural gas infrastructure company whose operations the FTC identified as competitive with ExxonMobil, an interlocking directorate concern, the legal significance of which is examined in Part IV. And Sheffield stood to receive compensation of at least $151 million from the transaction, predominantly in ExxonMobil stock, a personal stake whose significance is reflected both in the forcefulness of his public response to the FTC's intervention and in his subsequent decision to decline the board seat entirely.

The Acquisition

Timeline

The merger agreement was signed on October 10, 2023, and unanimously approved by both boards. Pioneer's shareholders ratified the transaction at a special meeting on February 7, 2024. The deal closed on May 3, 2024, approximately six months from announcement, against an eleven-month industry average, a timeline ExxonMobil management publicly attributed to the quality of pre-close integration planning.

Motivation

The strategic rationale rested on three pillars. First, the geological scarcity and non-replicability of Tier 1 Permian acreage: Pioneer's 850,000 contiguous Midland Basin acres represent an endowment that cannot be assembled through organic investment at any price, a permanent competitive position that, in the authors' assessment, conventional antitrust market analysis designed for contestable markets is structurally ill-equipped to evaluate. Second, cost structure: at approximately $9 per barrel operating cost and a supply cost below $35 per BOE inclusive of capital expenditure, Pioneer's assets generate robust returns across a wide range of price environments, including those significantly below the $86 per barrel level that prevailed at announcement. Third, transition-risk management: shale wells recover approximately 80% of their producible reserves within four years, versus 15 to 20 years for conventional wells, reducing long-cycle capital commitment and stranded-asset exposure in ways that bear directly on the climate disclosure obligations examined in Part V.

Integration

ExxonMobil issued 545 million shares, with a fair value of approximately $63 billion at the acquisition date, and assumed $5 billion of Pioneer's existing debt. Integration results validated the strategic logic: Q2 2024 upstream production reached 4,358 kboe/day, a 15% quarter-on-quarter increase. Alongside these operational results, ExxonMobil committed in its Form 8-K of October 11, 2023 to achieving net-zero Scope 1 and 2 emissions from its Permian operations by 2030, and to accelerating Pioneer's own 2050 target to 2035 for the combined entity, commitments made publicly in the context of a material securities transaction whose legal status under applicable disclosure frameworks is addressed in Part V.

Legal Contentions and Regulatory Impact

The Absence of Structural Case

The departure point for understanding the FTC’s intervention is to acknowledge what the Commission’s complaint did not allege. After conducting a full Hart-Scott-Rodino second-request investigation, the Commission filed its complaint without alleging that the acquisition would significantly increase market concentration, eliminate substantial head-to-head competition, or advance any vertical theory of harm. A transaction that created the dominant producer in the Permian Basin, a basin accounting for approximately 40% of total US oil output, cleared the Commission's structural analysis without a single required divestiture. That outcome is not a consequence of regulatory oversight; it is a direct consequence of the structural limitations of the applicable analytical framework, which are addressed in Section IV.3 below. Having found no structural case, the Commission nonetheless imposed conditions, deploying merger review for a purpose the statute does not contemplate.

The Sheffield Consent Order: Theory, Terms, and Deficiency

The mechanism that triggered the FTC’s intervention was a single contractual provision. The merger agreement required ExxonMobil to “take all necessary actions to cause Scott D. Sheffield … to be appointed to the board of directors” upon consummation. The Commission's theory was as follows: Sheffield had engaged in conduct aimed at aligning US Permian production with OPEC+ supply decisions; his appointment to ExxonMobil's board would give him a governance platform at the world's largest non-government-owned publicly traded oil company from which to continue and amplify that coordination; and the merger therefore 'may substantially lessen competition' within the meaning of Clayton Act Section 7.

The evidentiary basis is divided into two categories. On the public record, the complaint relied on Sheffield’s documented advocacy for Permian production discipline, his public statements urging capital restraint; his 2020 engagement with the Texas Railroad Commission, during which he stated: “If Texas leads the way, maybe we can get OPEC to cut production. Maybe Saudi and Russia will follow. That was our plan” and his acknowledgment that major institutional shareholders would punish companies returning to volume growth. Beyond the public record, the complaint alleged that Sheffield “exchanged hundreds of text messages with OPEC representatives and officials” including through WhatsApp communications directed at aligning Permian output with cartel supply policy.

Sheffield's response was direct. Through counsel, he characterized the FTC's account as a false narrative and a baseless interpretation of the applicable law. He disputed the allegations of private communications, representing that he had transmitted a single text message to facilitate contact between OPEC Secretary General Barkindo and the Texas Railroad Commission as part of an official government proceeding, with the remaining alleged messages being broadcast news to large recipient lists. In doing so, he invoked, in substance if not by name, the First Amendment petitioning rationale that the Noerr-Pennington doctrine formalizes, a characterization that is the authors' own legal analysis of his stated position.

The consent order, approved 3-2 on May 2, 2024, and finalized 3-2 on January 16, 2025, imposed three obligations: a permanent prohibition on Sheffield’s board appointment or advisory role at ExxonMobil; a five-year prohibition on specified Pioneer personnel; and a ten-year Section 8 attestation obligation. On July 17, 2025, the Commission voted 3-0 to set aside the order, simultaneously vacating the structurally identical order in the Chevron/Hess transaction. The vacatur found the original complaint had “failed to plead any antitrust law violation under Section 7 of the Clayton Act,” had “contained no allegations that Exxon’s acquisition of Pioneer would be anticompetitive”

The legal deficiency was fundamental. Section 7 is a structural statute whose operative inquiry concerns market concentration, not the personal conduct of an individual officer. As the dissenting commissioners observed, “one of twelve board members will likely be less able to orchestrate coordination than could that same individual when he was a chief executive officer.” Commissioner Holyoak characterized the majority’s construction as “one of the most ludicrous theories of harm in [the FTC’s] merger-enforcement history,” while simultaneously acknowledging Sheffield’s alleged conduct was troubling, a concession that the competitive concern was genuine, even if the legal instrument deployed was inadequate to address it.

The Structural Immunisation of OPEC-Aligned Conduct

The conduct alleged against Sheffield, a domestic executive coordinating with foreign sovereign oil producers to suppress US production and support global prices, falls on its face within the language of the Sherman Act Section 1. The question of why it was not pursued as a direct antitrust matter is answered by three independent and cumulative doctrinal barriers.

The Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act provides the first barrier. OPEC member states exercising production policy authority over their natural resources are paradigmatic sovereign governmental actors, and the commercial activity exception to FSIA has consistently been found inadequate to reach OPEC production decisions. The act of state doctrine provides the second, independent barrier: as established in Banco Nacional de Cuba v. Sabbatino, US courts decline to adjudicate the legality of acts taken by foreign sovereigns within their own territories, particularly in areas such as national resource management that are core attributes of sovereignty. The Noerr-Pennington doctrine provides the third and most directly applicable barrier: concerted efforts to petition government are immune from antitrust liability even where the underlying purpose is anticompetitive, and Sheffield’s facilitation of contact between OPEC’s Secretary General and the Texas Railroad Commission falls squarely within the core of that protection.

The combined operation of these three doctrines produces a structural immunisation of OPEC-aligned executive conduct from any existing remedial instrument of US law. The FTC’s resort to Section 7 was a second-best response to a first-order enforcement gap, an attempt to regulate conduct that the primary legal frameworks could not reach, through the only available point of leverage: a contractual board appointment. Recognizing this does not excuse the legal deficiency; it identifies the genuine legislative problem the transaction exposed.

The Available Theory: Clayton Act Section 8

A more conventional theory was available and not pursued as a primary claim. Sheffield’s concurrent directorship at The Williams Companies would, upon his ExxonMobil board appointment, have created an interlocking directorate of the kind Section 8 of the Clayton Act expressly prohibits above defined revenue thresholds. The Commission acknowledged the interlock but invoked Section 5 of the FTC Act rather than Section 8, on the procedural ground that Section 8 can attach only to an existing appointment.

The strategic consequence of this choice was material. By subsuming a conventional and supportable Section 8 allegation within a novel and ultimately unsustainable Section 7 theory, the Commission entangled what it demonstrably could have pursued within what it could not legally sustain. The dissent’s acknowledgment of the Williams interlock as “troubling” was a concession that a viable legal concern existed in the vicinity of what the Commission was attempting. Unanimous vacatur, citing a foundational legal deficiency, will constrain future behavioral-merger enforcement more than a narrowly decided structural loss ever could.

Industry Impact

The ExxonMobil/Pioneer announcement triggered a wave of consolidation without precedent in the modern US energy sector. Within twelve months, approximately $250 billion in M&A was announced: Chevron’s $53 billion acquisition of Hess Corporation twelve days after Pioneer; Occidental’s $12.4 billion acquisition of CrownRock in December 2023; the Chesapeake/Southwestern Energy merger for $11.5 billion in January 2024; Diamondback’s $26 billion acquisition of Endeavor Energy in February 2024; and ConocoPhillips’s $22.5 billion acquisition of Marathon Oil in November 2024. The FTC reviewed each transaction, requiring no structural divestitures in upstream production markets in any of them. By early 2026, three entities controlled the dominant share of a basin producing approximately 40% of total US oil output.

The antitrust framework’s inability to mount a structural response is not attributable to regulatory indifference; it is a product of analytical incapacity. Twenty-three senators and 50 members of Congress separately urged the FTC to assess the consolidation wave as a pattern of cumulative effects under the 2023 Merger Guidelines. The Commission proceeded transactionally, and the explanation lies in the statute: Clayton Act Section 7 requires identification of a domestic line of commerce in which concentration substantially lessens competition. Crude oil is a globally fungible commodity whose price is determined primarily by sovereign OPEC+ production decisions rather than by the relative market shares of domestic producers. No US court has defined a domestic crude oil product market adequate for Section 7 horizontal analysis, and without that market definition, there is no analytical basis for a structural challenge, regardless of how concentrated Permian production becomes. The law is not broken; it is designed for a different competitive reality.

The environmental disclosure dimension warrants independent legal attention. ExxonMobil’s commitment to net-zero Scope 1 and 2 Permian emissions by 2030, disclosed in the Form 8-K of October 11, 2023, was made in the context of a material securities transaction and constitutes a representation on which investors could reasonably rely. The SEC’s March 2024 Climate Disclosure Rule was abandoned by the Trump-era Commission in March 2025. That development does not resolve the pre-existing Rule 10b-5 question: material misstatements or omissions made in connection with a securities transaction remain actionable regardless of the status of sector-specific disclosure rules. ExxonMobil simultaneously projects Permian production of 2 million BOE per day by 2027 and net-zero Scope 1 and 2 emissions in the Permian by 2030; the legal tension between those two representations has not been addressed in the public record. The multi-jurisdictional dimension compounds the question: the EU CSRD and California SB 253 impose reporting obligations on ExxonMobil’s European counterparties and California-related operations that were not stayed and do not await US regulatory resolution.

House View

Post-Closing: Performance and Governance

The operational picture of the combined entity is positive on the metrics that matter to shareholders. Synergies tracked ahead of the projected $2 billion annual run-rate; production records were established in Q2 2024; and by early 2026, Permian output exceeded 1.3 million BOE per day with a 15-to-20-year drilling inventory remaining. The financial risks are material but manageable: net debt reached $10.1 billion against a projected $3.5 billion, and a sustained Brent crude environment of $68-79 per barrel compresses the deal’s return profile relative to the $86 assumption on which it was modelled. The $35/BOE cost of supply provides structural insulation, but disciplined capital allocation will be required to address the gap between the price environment assumed at announcement and the one that has prevailed since closing.

The post-vacatur governance position merits specific attention. No legal impediment to a Sheffield board appointment remains as a matter of the FTC proceeding, but Sheffield has stated publicly that he is no longer interested, citing ExxonMobil’s consent to the original order as a breach of the merger agreement’s commitment to him. Whether that position is permanent carries ongoing implications under NYSE listing standards governing independent director qualification. The vacatur resolves the regulatory question; the contractual and governance questions it leaves open are not trivial. The broader geopolitical environment compounds the urgency: as global supply dynamics, including the ongoing US maximum pressure campaign against Iranian oil exports, reshape price formation in global crude markets, the governance framework governing the world’s most consequential private Permian producer cannot responsibly remain a product of enforcement gaps rather than deliberate legal design.

Structural Gaps and Legislative Remedies

Three specific reforms follow from the structural failures identified in this article.

The first is a targeted amendment to the Clayton Act Section 7, authorizing the imposition of behavioral conditions in merger reviews where a party’s officer or director has engaged in adjudicated, not merely alleged, conduct that creates an articulable and documented risk of post-merger coordination in a relevant market. Such an amendment must expressly exclude constitutionally protected petitioning activity from the definition of qualifying predicate conduct, preserving the Noerr-Pennington protections the Sheffield proceedings brought into focus. The FTC’s instinct was defensible as a matter of policy; its error was the absence of statutory authority to act on that instinct.

The second is a sector-specific regulatory framework for globally integrated commodity producers, modelled on the Bank Holding Company Act, that provides a single regulatory body with jurisdiction over the governance and foreign entanglements of entities whose market power operates through sovereign production agreements rather than through domestic product market behaviour. Critically, such a framework must establish a statutory information-sharing and enforcement coordination mechanism between OFAC and the antitrust agencies, the institutional bridge that the Sheffield case demonstrated to be entirely absent.

The third reform directly addresses the FSIA barrier. The terrorism exception at 28 U.S.C. § 1605A demonstrates that Congress is capable of creating narrow exceptions to sovereign immunity without displacing the doctrine’s general application. An analogous exception for foreign sovereign cartel coordination that produces a direct, documented, and intentional price-distorting effect on US domestic commodity markets would provide US courts with the jurisdictional authority to reach the conduct that FSIA currently immunises, without requiring adjudication of the general lawfulness of sovereign resource policy. Together, these three reforms address the full span of the enforcement gap this transaction exposed.

Conclusion

The FTC’s intervention in the ExxonMobil/Pioneer transaction accomplished nothing under competition law and everything under legal diagnosis. The consent order was reversed, the combined entity operates without constraint, and the conduct that prompted the Commission’s concern remains unaddressed by any instrument of US law. That outcome reflects three structural failures: a fundamental mismatch between Clayton Act doctrine and the competitive dynamics of globally integrated commodity markets; the structural immunisation of OPEC-aligned executive conduct through the combined operation of FSIA, the act of state doctrine, and Noerr-Pennington; and the institutional absence of any coordination mechanism between antitrust enforcement and the sanctions architecture governing conduct at the intersection of corporate governance and foreign sovereign production policy. These are not doctrinal abstractions. They are the reason the FTC reached for a tool it lacked the authority to use, and the reason a unanimous successor Commission repudiated it in terms that leave no ambiguity. Addressing those structural failures is the work that this case, and the scale of the consolidation it has accelerated, have made unavoidable.

References

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Federal Trade Commission (2025), supra note 35; In re Chevron Corp./Hess Corp., FTC Matter No. 2410008, Order Vacated (17 July 2025).

Federal Trade Commission (2025), supra note 35.

In re Exxon Mobil Corp., supra note 39.

Clayton Act § 7, 15 U.S.C. § 18; International Association of Machinists v. OPEC, 477 F. Supp. 553 (C.D. Cal. 1979).

Holyoak, M. & Ferguson, A.N. (2025), supra note 10.

Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, 28 U.S.C. §§ 1602–11; International Association of Machinists v. OPEC, 477 F. Supp. 553 (C.D. Cal. 1979).

Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, 28 U.S.C. §§ 1602–11; IAM v. OPEC, supra note 43.

International Association of Machinists v. OPEC, 649 F.2d 1354, 1358–60 (9th Cir. 1981); Banco Nacional de Cuba v. Sabbatino, 376 U.S. 398 (1964); Underhill v. Hernandez, 168 U.S. 250 (1897).

Noerr Motor Freight, 365 U.S. 127; United Mine Workers v. Pennington, 381 U.S. 657, supra note 38; Holyoak, M. & Ferguson, A.N. (2025), supra note 10.

Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act, 28 U.S.C. §§ 1602–11; IAM v. OPEC, supra note 43; International Association of Machinists v. OPEC, 649 F.2d 1354, 1358–60 (9th Cir. 1981); Banco Nacional de Cuba v. Sabbatino, 376 U.S. 398 (1964); Underhill v. Hernandez, 168 U.S. 250 (1897); Noerr Motor Freight, 365 U.S. 127; United Mine Workers v. Pennington, 381 U.S. 657, supra note 38.

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Covington & Burling LLP (2024), supra note 54, Federal Trade Commission (2025), supra note 35.

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Clayton Act § 7, 15 U.S.C. § 18; IAM v. OPEC, supra note 43.

ExxonMobil Corporation (2023), supra note 1; Bacon & Foster, supra note 4; Eccles, R.G. (2024). Is ExxonMobil's Acquisition of Pioneer Good News or Bad News for Climate Change? Forbes, 20 January. [online]. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobeccles/2024/01/20/is-exxonmobils-acquisition-of-pioneer-good-news-or-bad-news-for-climate-change/.

ExxonMobil Corporation (2023), supra note 1; Bacon & Foster, supra note 4; Eccles, R.G. (2024), supra note 71.

SEC (2024). Enhancement and Standardization of Climate-Related Disclosures. Federal Register, 89, 21668, 28 March (voluntarily stayed 4 April 2024); SEC (2025). SEC Votes to End Defense of Climate Disclosure Rules, 27 March. [online]. Available at: https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025-58.

SEC Rule 10b-5, 17 C.F.R. § 240.10b-5.

EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, Directive 2022/2464/EU; California SB 253 (Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, signed October 2023).

Chronicles Journal / Market Minute (2026) supra note 64.

Invest Heroe (2024). Exxon Mobil: Greater Synergies From Merger With Pioneer, But Lower Oil Prices. Seeking Alpha, 18 September. [online]. Available at: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4721791-exxon-mobil-greater-synergies-from-merger-with-pioneer-but-lower-oil-prices-hold-confirmed.

Invest Heroe (2024), supra note 79; Patel, Y. (2024), supra note 6;

Federal Trade Commission (2025), supra note 35.

Hart Energy (2025). Scott Sheffield Bashes Exxon Mobil After FTC Clears Him, 18 July. [online]. Available at: https://www.hartenergy.com/exclusives/scott-sheffield-bashes-exxon-mobil-after-ftc-clears-him-213581/.

Hart Energy (2025), supra note 82.

Federal Trade Commission (2025), supra note 35.

Trump, D.J. (2025). National Security Presidential Memorandum 2, 4 February. [online]. Available at: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/02/national-security-presidential-memorandum-nspm-2/.

Clayton Act § 7, 15 U.S.C. § 18.

Noerr Motor Freight, 365 U.S. 127; United Mine Workers v. Pennington, 381 U.S. 657, supra note 38; Holyoak, M. & Ferguson, A.N. (2025), supra note 10.

Federal Trade Commission (2025), supra note 35.

Bank Holding Company Act, 12 U.S.C. §§ 1841 et seq.

Federal Trade Commission (2025), supra note 35; Clayton Act § 7, 15 U.S.C. § 18, IAM v. OPEC, supra note 43.

Federal Trade Commission (2025), supra note 35.

28 U.S.C. § 1605A (FSIA terrorism exception, enacted 28 January 2008, Pub. L. 110-181).

Federal Trade Commission (2025), supra note 35; 28 U.S.C. § 1605A (FSIA terrorism exception, enacted 28 January 2008, Pub. L. 110-181).

Federal Trade Commission (2025), supra note 35; Clayton Act § 7, 15 U.S.C. § 18, IAM v. OPEC, supra note 43; Bank Holding Company Act, 12 U.S.C. §§ 1841 et seq; Clayton Act § 7, 15 U.S.C. § 18.

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