Slaughter and May partner Malcolm Nicholson must have thought his name was burned on to the European Commission's (EC) collective consciousness following his historic victory in Airtours, which ushered in the EC's current reformist programme.
However, at the EC merger control conference last week, the chairman of the panel discussing Airtours could not remember Nicholson's name and introduced the Slaughters partner as Malcolm Thompson. It was left to the new Deputy Director-General Philip Lowe to get Nicholson's name right, describing him as “a poacher with a particularly large piece of game in his bag”.
