Secondary Buy-out of Wessel-Werk Group
Milbank Advises Acquiror DZ Equity Partner
Munich, 7 November 2006. DZ Equity Partner, a captive private equity fund of the major German DZ Bank Group, has purchased Wessel-Werk Group, a leading manufacturer of vacuum cleaner nozzles and accessories, for an undisclosed sum from Barclays Private Equity. The international law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP advised the acquiror.
Milbank’s Frankfurt and Munich offices advised DZ Equity Partner on all aspects of the transaction: tax structure, acquisition finance, negotiation of sales agreement and setup of management participation. This acquisition was one of its first of a kind that brought Milbank Germany’s integrated capabilities – corporate, finance and tax – to bear in a single transaction.
The Milbank team representing DZ Equity Partner included Dr. Peter Nussbaum (partner, Corporate Munich), associates Stefan Kroeker, Dr. Michael Pujol, Dr. Daniel Gubitz and Ludger Schult (all Corporate Munich), Dr. Rolf Füger (partner, Tax Munich), associates Dr. Thomas Kleinheisterkamp and Dr. Reinhard Ege (both Tax Munich), Dr. Rainer Magold (partner, Finance Frankfurt) and associates Stephan Dulitz and Maximilian Schneider (both Finance Frankfurt).
About Milbank
Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP is a preeminent global law firm that for more than 140 years has provided innovative legal solutions in many of the world’s largest, most complex, “first-ever” corporate transactions and litigation. Our transactional expertise includes capital markets, corporate finance and transactions, project finance, acquisition finance, and other major fields of law practice. Milbank litigation teams resolve disputes involving mergers and acquisitions, proxy battles, financings and securities offerings, intellectual property, white collar crime, and corporate restructurings, among others. Our clients range from prominent multinational financial, industrial and commercial enterprises to governments, institutions and individuals. The Firm is headquartered in New York, with offices in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, London, Frankfurt, Munich, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore and Beijing.
Milbank set up its first European office in London in 1979. The firm´s German offices were opened in Frankfurt in 2001 and in Munich in 2004. Milbank´s European presence has more than doubled in the last two years with growing practices in capital markets, corporate, finance, private equity, outsourcing and litigation. By combining the skill and experience of the lawyers in Milbank´s German offices with that of the finance, corporate and tax lawyers based in other Milbank offices, in particular London and New York, Milbank Germany offers its clients fully integrated legal advice at the highest level in these core areas under German, English and US law.