With Google’s $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility finally completed, a new report has brought to light the fact that Apple, one of its biggest rivals, tried to lure away Google executive Dennis Woodside, who was just named Moto’s new CEO.

Citing two people familiar with the matter, Bloomberg Businessweek reports that Apple CEO Tim Cook was personally attempting to poach Woodside away from the online search giant to install him as Apple’s head of sales.

In order to convince him to stay, Google CEO Larry Page is said to have promised Woodside greater responsibility at the company in the summer of 2011, positioning the former attorney as a potential leader for the newly acquired smartphone and tablet maker.

Bloomberg’s Brad Stone and Peter Burrows break it down:

Now it was time to make good. Woodside says he was speaking with board member Ram Shriram when Page asked him to run Motorola Mobility, the company Google had just acquired for $12.5 billion. “He said, ‘I know you’ve been looking for a challenge,’” Woodside recalls. “’I want you to run Motorola. I think you’d be great at it. Can you let me know by tonight?’”

At Google, Woodside is credited with helping expand its operations across the EMEA regions and Russia, driving revenues up from $10.8 billion to $17.5 billion in three years as President of Google’s Americas business.

Woodside, an Ironman triathlete, has been with Google since 2003 and is close friends with Larry Page. It isn’t known whether he was promised the Motorola position when Google announced the acquisition, but with Apple interested, the decision could have been made a lot more swiftly than anticipated.

This isn’t the only revelation tucked away in Bloomberg Businessweek’s report, by the way. Google has also acquired design studio Mike and Maaike.

The complex mess of patent-related battles in the mobile industry has taken another twist. It’s emerged that Apple has filed a formal antitrust complaint against Motorola Mobility to the European Commission.

Apple’s complaint emerged in Motorola Mobility’s latest annual report, filed yesterday. As FOSS Patents notes, the document reveals that the company has only just been informed of the complaint:

“On February 17, 2012, the Company received a letter from the European Commission, Competition Directorate-General, (the ‘Commission’) notifying it that the Commission has received a complaint against Motorola Mobility, Inc. (‘MMI’) by Apple, Inc. (‘Apple’) regarding the enforcement of MMI’s standards-essential patents against Apple allegedly in breach of MMI’s FRAND commitments. Apple’s complaint seeks the Commission’s intervention with respect to standards-essential patents.”

The complaint relates to Motorola Mobility’s handling of patents that it holds which are classified as requiring licensing to others on ’fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory‘ (FRAND) terms. This is designed to ensure that companies do not use patents to monopolise a sector by offering unreasonable licensing terms.

Apple believes Motorola is in breach of this commitment, something also evident in its recently initiated lawsuit in the US.

A Motorola Mobility spokesperson has told Bloomberg Businessweek that the company “has a long-standing practice of licensing our patents on fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory terms and we offered those to Apple,” adding that the two companies have been in licensing talks since 2007.

Earlier this week, the European Commission approved Google’s acquisition of Motorola Mobility. However, it expressed concerns over Motorola’s handling of patent licensing. FOSS Patents noted earlier in the week that such concerns could not be dealt with as part of a mergers and acquisitions procedure.

With Samsung already under investigation by the European Commission for its approach to licensing patents, it seems likely that Apple’s complaint will be taken forward into a formal probe.

Meanwhile, as noted by Slashgear, Motorola also notes that it sees one potential threat this year being Nokia entering the tablet market. Back in December 2011, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said that Nokia “does not have an exact plan” with regard to tablets, but that it was “studying the markets carefully.” If a Nokia tablet emerged that was anything near as nice as these fan-made renders, Motorola would definitely have cause for concern.

Earlier today we reported that the European Commission blessed the Google-Motorola Mobility deal, and we’re learning that the United States has also given its final seal of approval making the deal complete.

According to a Reuters reporter, the approval has been given a few moments ago:

All clear! Google-Motorola deal approved by Dept of Justice. $GOOG

— Poornima Gupta (@PoornimaGupta) February 13, 2012

The deal has been waiting approval since it was first made in August of 2011. There were concerns that the acquisition would give Google an unfair advantage in the mobile space, especially since it would be grabbing over 17,000 patents currently held by Motorola Mobility.

The price for Motorola’s handset division? A cool $12.5B. Google’s CEO, Larry Page, said in August that this acquisition would help “supercharge the Android ecosystem”:

This acquisition will not change our commitment to run Android as an open platform. Motorola will remain a licensee of Android and Android will remain open. We will run Motorola as a separate business. Many hardware partners have contributed to Android’s success and we look forward to continuing to work with all of them to deliver outstanding user experiences.

The combination of Google and Motorola will not only supercharge Android, but will also enhance competition and offer consumers accelerating innovation, greater choice, and wonderful user experiences. I am confident that these great experiences will create huge value for shareholders.

Along with Motorola Mobility, Google will be acquiring a few active lawsuits, one of which coming from Apple over a Qualcomm wireless transmission patent license. Apple is being sued by Motorola Mobility as well, over technology used in six of its products.

The “will they or won’t they” argument is apparently over when it comes to Google’s monster $12.5B acquisition of Motorola Mobility. According to a report by Reuters, the Department of Justice will soon officially approve the sale.

The deal has been held up since Google announced the bid in August, and immediately threw up red flags to those concerned about possible antitrust issues.

What Google is valuing most in the Motorola deal are the patents that the mobile phone producer holds. Currently, Motorola Mobility is suing Apple over claims of copyright infringement. The suit involves patents used in six Apple products, including the iPhone 4S.

Without a doubt, the acquisition of Motorola by Google will strengthen the company’s position in the mobile space, giving the Android platform a clear advantage. Google has said that it won’t do anything different in the way it handles patent lawsuits than Motorola has in the past, but even that’s a scary thought.

This is certainly not the first time that Google has done a deal involving important patents, as it acquired 217 of them in a deal last month with IBM. At that time, these were the interesting patents the company acquired:

Among those are patents for mobile advertising, reducing strain on wireless networks, rendering web pages on a mobile device, Near Field Communication, mobile OS update delivery, shuttling web apps between devices, semantic social networks, voice search, VOIP and one seemingly very broad patent for a ‘Computer Phone’.

To protect its Android platform, it is said that Google really only needs 18 of the over 17K patents it will be acquiring from Motorola.

At its launch event earlier this month, Murdoch said he expected The Daily to be on all major tablets in the future, but was quoted saying that “last year, this year and maybe next year belong to iPad.”

So it is a bit surprising to hear that the “iPad newspaper” could appear on tablets like Motorola’s XOOM in just a few months time.

For now The Daily is sold exclusively through the Apple store.

Read here for Everything You Need to Know About the Daily’s Launch.