Big four team were involved in £3.5bn worth of deals in North West last year

Richard Harding

The North West transaction team at accountancy firm EY were involved in £3.5bn worth of deals last year.

The highlights included ECI’s investment in Moneypenny and Inflexion’s investments in Mountain Warehouse and UKFast.

Other completed deals include LDC’s investment in Love Energy Savings, the sale of Perstorp to Ingevity, the sale of Damovo to Eli Global and two acquisitions for Manchester Airports Group (Looking4.com and Skyparksecure).

The North West transactions advisory services and transactions law teams also recruited 17 people in 201.

There were also promotions for Edward Gale, Steven Kingham and Rob Warren to Director.

Richard Harding, head of transactions for EY in the North, said: “2018 was another fantastic year for our North West transactions team.

“The local M&A market remains buoyant, and there are high levels of competition for quality businesses from both corporate and private equity investors.

“This has driven strong deal activity and we expect this to continue in 2019.

“The promotion of Edward and Steven underlines our continued investment in growing our team.

“We have a real focus on developing our people and it’s pleasing to see them progress through the firm to senior roles.

“They have already made a huge contribution to their clients and we look forward to helping them develop further in the future.”

Mark Clephan, Partner and Head of Corporate Finance at EY in the North, added: “Competition for high-quality businesses has never been higher, with corporates and PE sitting on staggering amounts of capital.

“We are seeing potential acquirers being increasingly creative in a bid to stay ahead of the competition.

“Although we expect this strong appetite to continue into 2019, we are mindful of the ongoing uncertainty caused by Brexit and at a global trade level.

“Nonetheless, we are not yet seeing the effect of either of these dynamics and are cautiously optimistic that we will see another strong year for transactions in 2019.”

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