First Choice and rival MyTravel have both instructed longstanding counsel Herbert Smith and Slaughter and May on preliminary talks for a potential tie-up worth £500m. Herbert Smith’s and Slaughters’ instructions are a recreation of 1999, when MyTravel’s predecessor Airtours made a £852m hostile takeover bid for First Choice. Both firms acted on this. Addleshaw Goddard, […]
Baker & McKenzie‘s London office has acted for the first Georgian company to list its shares on the London Stock Exchange (LSE). Bakers advised the Bank of Georgia on its $139m (£72m) listing, which involved a combination of issuing 6.6 million new shares and the sale of 1.1 million existing shares in the form of […]
Dechert’s London office has lured a partner from Lawrence Graham to bolster its finance and real estate practice. Kathleen O’Donnell will join Dechert’s seven-partner real estate finance team in London on Monday (4 December) and will work under practice leader Ciaran Carvalho. O’Donnell mainly has experience on the lending side of real estate finance. Her […]
The Vietnamese government has come under fire from activists for cracking down on free speech by enacting laws criminalising dissenting views on the internet. According to a report published by the OpenNet Initiative, a collaboration between Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford and Toronto universities to monitor internet censorship, the legislation makes it a crime to use the […]
Norton Rose has triumphed in a Court of Appeal spat over the enforcement of an arbitration award against the Lithuanian government. The firm was acting for Swedish energy giant Svenska Petroleum Exploration in its dispute with Lithuania over a 1993 joint venture agreement to exploit Lithuania’s oil reserves. A contract was signed between Svenska and […]
Addleshaw Goddardhas advised on the management buyout (MBO) of a fund of hedge fund managers. Addleshaws corporate partner Tim Bee advised management group Atlas Capital Associates (Acal) along with Cayman firm Maples & Calder. The group bought out Atlas Capital Group Holding, which was advised by Swiss firm Lenz & Staehelin and Luxembourg’s Elvinger Hoss […]
Macfarlanes and Wall Street firm Cravath Swaine & Moore have secured key roles on a £4.3bn counter-bid for Corus in an intensifying battle for the Anglo-Dutch steelmaker. Brazilian group Companhia Siderúrgica Nacional (CSN) made a last-minute offer to trump that of Indian giant Tata in October. CSN and Corus held failed talks in 2002. CSN […]
Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and Sidley Austin last week landed roles on the latest private equity-backed mega-deal, which is set to break a slew of records. Marquee Simpson Thacher client Blackstone launched a $36bn (£19bn) bid for the US’s biggest landlord Equity Office Properties Trust (EOP), making it the largest buyout in history. Blackstone’s acquisition […]
Lovells has strengthened its relationship with key client Barclays, teaming up with the bank to provide council home residents with last-minute help to prevent eviction. Together with Barclays’ financial inclusion team, the City firm has donated £51,000 to the Bow County Court Advice Network (BCCAN). The funds are being used to provide housing debt advice […]
Allen & Overy (A&O), Herbert Smith with alliance firm Stibbe and Simmons & Simmons have all landed roles on the innovative listing of a closed-end company on Euronext, which hopes to raise EURO1.5bn (£1.01bn) to make it the largest IPO of a hedge fund on the Dutch bourse. Marshall Wace, the London-based hedge fund manager, […]
London firm Campbell Hooper received “the crumbs off Weil Gotshal [& Manges’] table”, according to Campbell Hooper chairman Martin Wright, by advising new client HG Capital on an asset disposal of a manufacturing company in which it had a controlling interest. Wright, who led the deal, explained that the firm scored its first instruction off […]
Torquay-based firm Boyce Hatton and Herbert Smith have advised on the UK’s first ‘clean coal’ power generation project – a £1bn, 800MW plant on Teesside. Herbert Smith, advising Centrica, and Boyce Hatton, advising Progressive Energy, orchestrated a joint venture between the two, which saw Centrica, the owner of British Gas, pay £7.15m for an 85 […]