City office advises on £1.56bn of deals over past six months
The Manchester office of law firm Squire Patton Boggs has advised on 38 transactions worth £1.56bn during the first half of 2021.
Headline deals included advising on the £600m main market IPO of Auction Technology Group, advising ROI Media on the acquisition of Firstborn Capital, advising LDC on its £30m investment in Wireless CCTV, and advising the management of Icelolly.com on its joint venture with TravelSupermarket.
A team comprising corporate partners James Fitzgibbon and Louise Barber, as well as associate Rebecca Meyers, advised ECI Partners as selling shareholder on the £600m main market IPO of ATG.
The firm advised on ATG’s sale to TA Associates less than 12 months before the IPO, with ECI retaining a minority stake in the company.
Corporate partner and head of the Manchester corporate team, Giles Chesher, together with Matthew Canipa, Matthew Flanagan and Ellie Lloyd, advised ROI Media on the acquisition of Copenhagen-based Firstborn Capital.
Mr Chesher also advised LDC on its £30m investment in Wireless CCTV, the market leading supplier of redeployable surveillance solutions. He was assisted by Rebecca Meyers, Chris Blair, Dominique Hibell and Gabe Pennington.
Andrea Cropley, corporate partner, assisted by Paul Mann and Louisa Hine, advised the management of Icelolly.com, an online package holiday travel intermediary specialising in price comparison and deals, on a joint venture with TravelSupermarket.
Mr Chesher said: “We have had an exceptionally busy first half of the year, due, in part, to pent-up demand and anxiety around a potential tax increase in the Budget.
“That said, activity levels remain high, driven by an array of issues – whether trade, regulatory or technological change, the need to secure supply chains or address sustainability, what is clear is that businesses are having to adapt and evolve to position themselves for future growth.
“From a private equity perspective, healthcare, life sciences and tech-focused investments are the sectors where we are seeing the most activity.”
Squire Patton Boggs was ranked first in Bloomberg’s Global M&A Advisory League Tables (Q1 2021) for UK Mid-Market by Deal Count, up to US$500m.
