When one of the UK’s most iconic summer holiday names came up for sale last year, there was only one man the client turned to for advice: Burness Paull corporate partner Edward Hunter. Hunter may have made partner just last August, but he was tasked with handling one of his firm’s largest deals of the year opposite a team led by Geoffrey Bailhache at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett advising the seller, Blackstone. The £300m sale of Butlin’s by Blackstone and Bourne Leisure to a newly-formed business owned by the Harris family was a complex, long-running saga characterised by an innovative carve-out. Butlin’s’ original owner, the Harris family, had been an investor in Kings Park Capital, the fund that had backed the business when it was acquired by Blackstone and which is a regular client of Hunter’s.
Cue a call to Burness Paull’s Yorkshire-bred, Edinburgh-educated private equity specialist Hunter, a lawyer whose workload is characterised by UK-focused matters originating out of London, despite his north-of-the-border location. For the private equity expert, the deal may have been epic, but it was nothing more than business as usual. Expect more of the same in 2023.