Company directors facing scrutiny over their low corporate tax bill are not able to effectively blame their decisions on their duty to shareholders, a Farrer & Co legal opinion sent to FTSE 100 companies has said. The opinion, sent yesterday (9 September) to the chief executives of the UK’s largest companies, was commissioned by the Tax …
David Stevenson and Alex Novarese assess SJ Berwin’s audacious Asia-Pacific tie-up and ask if the union can truly propel the firm into the global premier league ‘This isn’t about doing anything with our backs against the wall,’ says Jonathan Blake, the former senior partner of SJ Berwin, and one of the architects of his 165-partner …
Despite corporate partners attesting to a summer lull (if only by their absence from the office), the past month brought with it a number of headline European M&A deals, including a €17bn (including €9.8bn of net debt) bid for Dutch telecoms company Koninklijke KPN (KPN), which turned to Allen & Overy (A&O)’s Netherlands office on …
For 20 years now the (mainly) thankless role of the legal PR has put the comms professional between demanding and sometimes deluded partners and a restless media. Legal Business canvasses the men and women trying to bring order to the chaos He had been pacing the streets for hours, his path taking him from an …
Continue reading “The thick of it – a brief history of legal PR”
As leading retail and investment banks bolster their internal compliance functions it has emerged that Berwin Leighton Paisner’s (BLP) financial services partner Nick Kynoch has joined Barclays Investment Bank as the head of regulatory compliance for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). The hire comes after Hector Sants, former chief executive of the Financial Services …
Linklaters and Simmons & Simmons‘ longstanding corporate relationships with Amec and Kentz have gifted them with a potentially lucrative takeover bid instruction as Kentz this week announced it had rejected a £700m offer from its larger engineering rival. Linklaters corporate partners Shane Griffin and Aedamar Comiskey are leading the team for Amec, which it has advised …
Continue reading “Takeover potential – Linklaters & Simmons lead on Amec’s £700m bid for Kentz”
With all eyes on Berwin Leighton Paisner (BLP) the news that corporate finance partner and global head of private equity Raymond McKeeve has left to join US firm Jones Day’s London office could, in many ways, not have come at a worse time. Acknowledged by Legal 500 as ‘a leading private equity specialist’ McKeeve advises many of …
Continue reading “BLP loses head of private equity Raymond McKeeve to Jones Day”
As British industrial technology firm Edwards Group is today (19 August) bought out for $1.6bn by Swedish engineering group Atlas Copco, it is notably being advised by the London office of Wall Street firms Weil, Gotshal & Manges and Davis Polk & Wardwell. The Weil Gotshal team, which represented Edwards Group on its initial public offering …
Herbert Smith Freehills recent internal confidence that its run of post-merger exits had come to an end has been dashed after Friday (16 August) saw former Asia disputes head Gavin Lewis leave to join Linklaters. A ‘solid and experienced litigator’, Lewis is ‘among the best in Hong Kong’ according to The Legal 500 and his departure is …
With all eyes trained on Asia the office fall outs and launches have been throw into far sharper relief. Losing one former office head could be said to be an accident but DLA Piper’s loss in Singapore of its second former managing partner (MP), Matthew Glynn, is starting to look like trouble, after ex MP Martin …
