WKB devotes its largest team of highly specialized lawyers to handle mergers and acquisitions. The M&A team is supported by and coordinates the work of other WKB experts, including specialists in corporate, competition, labour and tax law. Experienced in all types of transactions, our M&A team has successfully handled stock deals that merge companies through the purchase of shares and/or other interests (including publicly traded securities), or asset deals, whereby assets (asset groups, enterprises or their organized parts) are purchased and sold. These transactions involve individuals, legal entities and other organizations, both domestic and foreign, and include international transactions spanning over a number of jurisdictions. Our focus on intellectual agility and creative thinking has led us to design proceedings not typical for M&A, such as restructuring (both private and composition-based) or bankruptcy.
WKB’s M&A team provides comprehensive and integrated handling of M&A transactions, including:
- Defining the legal and tax structures of transactions;
- Collecting, analyzing, executing and reporting the due diligence process, including preparatory, confirmatory, and post-closing processes;
- Assisting in negotiations of underlying contracts and related agreements/documents, ie. relating to the financing, security interests, shareholder agreements;
- Support and involvement in all transaction-related proceedings, including proceedings to obtain required permits as well as official reports and notifications;
- Representing clients in dealings with employees and trade unions, including transaction-related agreements (ie. social benefit packages);
- Transaction support and legal supervision for the completion process (ie. contracts, their interpretation and evaluation).
WKB’s M&A team experience extends to Poland’s very first M&A projects following the systemic transformation. These included privatization projects and the first joint ventures (such as privatizations of the first five state-owned enterprises and the first two state-owned banks). Since then, team members have reinforced their experience and demonstrated their responsiveness and expertise in a number of projects, including:
- Comprehensive legal advice and support in forming one of Poland’s leading energy groups (combining three power plants and two lignite mines);
- Share acquisition in a listed alcohol company for an American investment fund;
- Handling an international transaction to sell a media group (involving over twenty Polish companies, including one of Poland’s leading newspapers);
- Sale of the largest Polish shipyard in bankruptcy;
- Share acquisition in Poland’s largest telecommunications company by a consortium of leading Polish and foreign investors;
- Composition proceedings as part of financial restructuring of a holding company controlled by a major private telecommunications operator in Poland, recognized worldwide as a restructuring of the year in 2002;
- Acquisition of a Polish supermarket chain by a well-known sector investor;
- Privatization of banks;
- Acquisition by international investors (as part of privatization) and restructuring of a number of Polish power and heating plants;
- Representing one of the world’s largest steel manufacturers in acquiring shares in Poland’s four largest steelworks as part of a privatisation and restructuring process (debt swap);
- Squeeze-out at a leading Polish cement plant;
- Legal concept development and involvement in the privatization of a major electricity distributor;
- The merger of top fuel companies;
- Restructuring of an energy group by a foreign investor.
The position and achievements of our M&A lawyers are regularly noted by all renowned global lawyers’ publications (such as Chambers Global, Legal 500, PLC Which Lawyer? and European Legal Experts) and recognised in Poland (law firm rankings by the Rzeczpospolita daily and Forbes magazine). WKB projects have invariably been the focus of interest for the professional press in Poland and abroad (Mergers and Acquisitions, Acquisition Finance Magazine, Corporate UK).
