Big deals win out for Rainmaker team awards
ADDLESHAW Goddard has done the double – winning the Legal Team and Prolific Team of the Year categories at this year’s rainmaker Awards.
It was up against DLA Piper, DWF, Eversheds, Gateley, and Squire Patton Boggs for the team award and BDO, Brabners, Dow Schofield Watts, DWF, Gateley, and RSM in the Prolific category.
Addleshaw Goddard, which won the Legal team award for the second time in a row, advised on loo roll maker Accrol Papers’ listing on AIM this month, which valued the company at £63m and also worked on the Watkin Jones IPO in March, which had a market cap of £255m, making it the largest listing to come out of the region since Boohoo.com two years ago.
Receiving the Legal Team award, corporate partner Paul Medlicott said: “We’ve had a great year as a team, working on lots of deals in the local market, thanks to everyone out there who are our clients. We’ve had a great team of people working with us.”
Asked whether the Brexit result meant that stock market listings might be tin on the ground going into next year’s rainmaker Awards, he said: “We’re going to have to take a bit of time to see what happens in terms of listings and IPOs.
“Before Brexit [happens], in terms of mainstream M&A and P&E, there might be a slowdown in the short term we all need to carry on doing transactions. If we can find them we’ll do them.”
Andy Green, M&A partner at Addleshaw Goddard, said on winning the Prolific Team award: “We are surprised to win, but we’ve been very lucky to have had a great year with some very good deals and it’s a great testament to the team bringing them in.
“There’s been some fantastic opportunities. The pipeline has slowed down a little bit in the last week or so, but we’ve got some great clients, fantastic businesses and there is a real sense of optimism and confidence post the Brexit vote.”
The Corporate Finance Team of the Year award, sponsored by Raymond James, was won by Zeus Capital for the third time running.
Tremayne Ducker, head of corporate finance at Zeus, which also won the Public Markets Deal of the Year for its role in the reverse takeover by Conviviality, trading as Bargain Booze, of Matthew Clark for £198.4m, also cited Accrol Papers’ AIM listing and construction firm Watkin Jones’ IPO as significant recent deals for the firm.
He said: “As a region we’ve got quite a heavy focus in the last few years on public transactions. We’ve managed to do some really interesting deals. It shows that Manchester can be a centre for public market deals as well as private equity transactions.”
He added: “This first part of the year’s been very good. We’ve raised £300m on the public markets, quite a way ahead in terms of deals we’ve made. Fingers crossed we’ll carry on.
Asked about Brexit he said: “We’ve all got to take stock, but we’re very confident. Although there was panic on the markets on Friday, the FTSE, has finished higher today, but we’ll continue to do a range of public and private equity deals over the next 12 months.”
The firm was up against BDO, Deloitte, Investec, PwC and Rothschild.
