Shipping newspaper company bought

INTERNATIONAL media business Headland Media, which has a Yorkshire office, has acquired NewsLink Services, the English daily newspaper for seafarers.

Yorkshire law firm Schofield Sweeney advised Headland Media on the acquisition.

NewsLink Services has interests in the Bahamas, Cyprus, India and the Philippines and provides positive news, information and entertainment from the UK to seafarers from 38 countries.

Headland Media, which has offices in Leeds, Liverpool and Tilbury in England, Copenhagen in Denmark and Fort Lauderdale and New Jersey in the USA, specialises in the provision of high quality and cost effective media content in text, audio and video formats to maritime, hotel and retail sectors around the world.

Earlier this year, Schofield Sweeney advised Headland on its £3.5m refinancing by Yorkshire Bank.

Headland was formed in 2008 as a management buyout from Sky where it had previously sat within the ‘365 Media’ brand.

Customers include retail chain outlets, commercial and business aircraft, merchant shipping fleets, government and military units, cruise line companies, super yachts, luxury resorts, city hotels, safari camps, gyms and individual business travellers.

Schofield Sweeney’s chairman, Chris Schofield, said: “Despite the general market conditions, which remain slow across all sectors, we have had an extremely active start to the year and, with a number of deals due to complete during May and June, the first half of this year is set to be one of our busiest on record.

“When the first signs of the recession started to emerge about 18 months ago, we took a decision to keep the team together and to continue to recruit high quality lawyers that came onto the market.

This approach ran contrary to other law firms who have downsized legal teams during this period. I am pleased to say that our strategy has paid off.”