Sponsored briefing: Growing interest in asset deals

Yegan Liaje of Pekin & Pekin describes a rising interest in asset deals following a period of economic uncertainty in Turkey

Turkey has faced some serious financial challenges in recent years, such as high inflation, currency collapse and rising borrowing costs; however, surprisingly, these challenges have not dramatically affected the Turkish M&A market in terms of total transaction volume; though, we have noticed that it has affected the deal type in which investors have gained interest. In the last two years, we have experienced asset deals attracting more attention in the eyes of investors, despite share deals still having more advantages. Although investors do not have to bother with costly revaluations and retitles of individual assets, and can typically assume non-assignable licenses and permits without having to reapply for the same licenses and permits in share deals, asset deals also have some noticeable benefits.

Probably the most appealing advantage of asset deals is to enable buyers to pick and choose what they want to buy in the relevant target company without being bound to the whole company, all the unwanted remaining assets and certainly their unwanted liabilities. In other words, asset deals provide a playing field for investors where they can freely choose what suits best their business insight, in contrast to share deals where the shares of the target company are purchased with all attached shareholding rights and obligations, but the target company would remain liable against third parties for all historic claims.

On the other hand, asset deals do have some procedural disadvantages as well; each category of asset and liabilities subject to the relevant asset deal will be evaluated separately for consent requirements or formal perfection requirements rendering asset deals procedurally more burdensome. Furthermore, even where there are no consent requirements or formal perfection requirements, notifications would have to be provided to creditors in order to prevent good-faith payments made by creditors to the seller with respect to acquired assets, since under the Turkish Code of Obligations, such good-faith payments would discharge the debts of creditors who were not informed of the transfer. One more interesting point about asset deals in Turkey: as per the Turkish Labour Code, in the event that a workplace is transferred to another legal body on the basis of a legal transaction, the employment contracts that exist at the workplace at the date of transfer are automatically transferred to the transferee together with all rights and obligations. Therefore, buyers are not able to pick and choose when it comes to employees!