EU Commission resumes probe into MMG (1208 HK) and Anglo American (AAL LN) deal and sets new decision deadline of November 30th

A resumed Phase II-style probe with a fresh statutory deadline signals the Commission has the information it needed and the clock is running again; in past EU merger reviews, resumption after suspension has typically preceded either a clearance decision, a remedies negotiation, or a move into deeper scrutiny, and the spread between the two stocks' deal-implied pricing tends to trade off that branch point. The actors are well flagged: the Commission's mergers directorate has prior form in mining and commodities deals of demanding divestitures or behavioural commitments where concentration in a specific commodity input is the concern, and Chinese state-linked acquirers have faced an extra layer of questions on supply security and subsidy risk. The key distinction is whether the sticking point is conventional horizontal overlap, which remedies can usually fix, or strategic-dependency objections, which have historically been harder to settle and have occasionally killed cross-border resource deals. Worth noting is that a fixed decision date compresses the timeline: parties typically table remedies in the weeks before the deadline, so any remedy submission or statement-of-objections chatter ahead of it is the usual tell for direction. Until the decision, the deal spread is the cleanest expression of the market's read, and prior episodes of this kind have widened on silence and tightened on remedy headlines.