Holly Vedova, the top competition official at the US Federal Trade Commission, is retiring, giving Chair Lina Khan the opportunity to make a new choice of a key deputy as she pursues an ambitious antitrust course.
(Bloomberg) — Holly Vedova, the top competition official at the US Federal Trade Commission, is retiring, giving Chair Lina Khan the opportunity to make a new choice of a key deputy as she pursues an ambitious antitrust course.
Vedova, the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, announced her resignation this week after more than 30 years with the agency in a message to staff, without giving a date for her departure, according to people familiar with the decision. They spoke anonymously because it wasn’t yet public.
Khan has taken a more aggressive approach to antitrust than many of her predecessors, particularly on mergers involving the tech giants. She herself named Vedova — a skilled FTC veteran who could hit the ground running — as the agency’s top competition staffer in June 2021. Now Vedova’s departure will give the chair a chance to name a new competition director in line with her evolving thinking.
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Vedova said in a statement that “working in pursuit of the FTC’s mission with the agency’s exceptional staff has been the greatest honor of my life” and that Khan’s leadership “has inspired a pivotal moment in antitrust enforcement.”
Earlier she served as an adviser to then-FTC Commissioner Rohit Chopra, who now heads the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and four other commissioners. She joined the agency in 1990.
The competition director heads the FTC’s merger and antitrust work, spearheading the agency’s teams of lawyers who handle probes and recommending which cases to litigate and which to settle.
The FTC unsuccessfully sued to block Meta Platforms Inc. from buying a virtual reality startup. It has challenged Microsoft Corp.’s proposed acquisition of Activision Blizzard Inc.
(Adds context to top of story and comment by Vedova in fourth paragraph.)
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