Asdburys?

My local town - medium size, no more - has a large Asda and a large Sainsburys.  Listening to the boss of Sainsburys on the TV yesterday morning saying, more than once, that if the proposed merger between the two companies comes about, there will be no store closures or staff lay-offs, makes me wonder how on earth that is going to work.  Doesn't seem to make commercial sense.  I wonder whether they are relying on the Competition and Markets Authority demanding that they sell off a certain number of stores as a condition of allowing the merger to go ahead - in which case they will be able to claim they didn't break that promise, but were subject to force majeure.