The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Friday approved Chevron Corp.’s acqusition of Unocal Corp. after a long-running FTC complaint against Unocal was resolved. Chevron announced in April it would buy Unocal for $16 billion in a cash and stock deal, plus assume nearly $2 billion in debt (see Daily GPI, April 5).

The FTC announced two settlements concerning antitrust charges concering Unocal’s patents for reformulated gasoline. Unocal agreed to stop enforcing the relevant reformulated gasoline patents, and it said it will make the patents public by the time the merger closes, the FTC said in a statement. The FTC stated that a key element of the settlement is Chevron’s agreement not to enforce patents of a Unocal subsidiary that could have increased gasoline prices in California by over half a billion dollars a year, or almost 6 cents a gallon.

The FTC’s complaint alleged that Unocal subsidiary Union Oil illegally acquired monopoly power in the technology market for producing low-emission gasoline mandated by the state of California. According to the complaint, Union Oil misrepresented to the California Air Resources Board (CARB) that certain gasoline research was nonproprietary and in the public domain, while simultaneously pursuing a patent that would enable it to charge substantial royalties if CARB used the research results in developing regulations.

©Copyright 2005Intelligence Press Inc. All rights reserved. The preceding news reportmay not be republished or redistributed, in whole or in part, in anyform, without prior written consent of Intelligence Press, Inc.