The New deal

The private equity dealmakers of the boom years have been shifted off the front pages. As the market shows signs of recovery, the US firms are challenging the established order

As private equity comes blinking into the light after a torrid couple of years, advisers are grappling with a new market, where leverage is a dirty word and once mighty European buyout houses look distinctly off colour. Continue reading “The New deal”

Double vision

With the market recovering slowly, Ashurst’s new-look corporate management team has its work cut out. The duo not only has to build and retain market share, but also restore some much-needed morale to the firm’s transactional team.

In City parlance, Stephen Lloyd and Simon Beddow could be said to be buying at the bottom of the market. Ashurst’s new corporate heads, in place since July, have taken over a practice hit hard by the drop off in deal activity and by the firm’s own restructuring. Partners have been asked to leave the practice, while some of its best young talent has left of its own accord.

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Shop around

Kraft Foods’ hostile takeover of Cadbury sparked renewed hysteria about foreign takeovers of the UK’s FTSE 350. For the Magic Circle, it means a client base under threat. LB reveals the winners and losers in the great British sell-off

Slaughter and May has acted for the target in more foreign takeovers of British household names than any other law firm in the past five years. Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer is the only Magic Circle firm to have seen its FTSE 350 client base shrink over the same period. And it is Freshfields, Clifford Chance and Allen & Overy that most often get the call from bidders as foreign direct investment changes the face of the elite corporate client base in the UK.

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Breaking convention

Despite the lip service paid to renewables, fossil fuels are far and away the leading source of global energy consumption. In the first part of LB’s global energy focus, we analyse the current trends in coal, natural gas and oil

In December 2009 Copenhagen replaced beleaguered golf star Tiger Woods as the most popular search term on Google — a fact that the United Nations Climate Change Conference boasted proudly on its homepage — as, of course, the Danish capital played host to the environmental summit. In finding ways to conserve it and make it cleaner, energy is now officially top of the global agenda.

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