US and Magic Circle advisers on the mega acquisition of ARM holdings by Japanese group SoftBank will together rake in £14.5m in fees, the latest deal documents show.
Slaughter and May, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, Davis Polk & Wardwell and Morrison & Foerster acted on the £24.3bn transaction, one of the largest ever European M&A deals and Softbank’s biggest buy to date.
According to the documents disclosed ahead of the deal, Slaughter and May and Davis Polk together pick up £9m for their advice on the transaction. ARM had turned to Slaughters senior partner Steve Cooke to advise it on the historic takeover, while Davis Polk’s managing partner Thomas Reid acted for the US firm.
But the legal fees pale in comparison to the £51.5m financial advisers took for acting for the UK tech business ARM. In addition, public relations adviser Brunswick raked in £4m.
On the Softbank side, Freshfields and MoFo together received the smaller sum of £5.5m, as financial advisers took £45.2m and PR companies earned up to £2m. Freshfields global M&A co-head Ben Spiers led on the deal, while MoFo Tokyo managing partner Ken Siegel advised Softbank.
SoftBank has said ARM will remain an independent business within SoftBank and continue to be headquartered in Cambridge. As part of the transaction, SoftBank has said it intends to at least double the number of ARM UK employees over the next five years.
The SoftBank deal is one of several high-profile UK tech deals to hit headlines this month, with UK computer parts maker Premier Farnell being the subject of two foreign takeover bids and London based payments firm VocaLink agreeing to be taken over by US firm MasterCard, which again featured Slaughters and Davis Polk.
victoria.young@legalease.co.uk
