Milbank Advises Financial Investor PAI Partners on Acquisition of Xella International
Munich, 16 July 2008 – Financial investors PAI Partners and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners are to jointly acquire the building materials manufacturer Xella International GmbH (Xella), a subsidiary of the family-owned conglomerate Franz Haniel & Cie. GmbH (Haniel). The international law firm Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP advised PAI Partners. The deal is valued at approximately EUR 1.8 billion. The completion of the transaction is subject to approval by the respective antitrust authorities.
The Munich Milbank team representing PAI Partners included Corporate/M&A partner Peter Nussbaum (lead) and associates Stefan Kroeker, Thorsten Fuehr, Axel Wahl and Camille Lamy. Nussbaum’s team has advised PAI Partners on several other projects in the past.
Xella is a major producer of building materials and raw materials, with brands such as Ytong, Hebel and Fermacell making it a worldwide leading manufacturer of aerated concrete, calcium-silicate blocks and gypsum fibreboards. With a total of 7,200 employees, Xella recorded approximately EUR 1.3 billion in revenue in 2007.
About Milbank
Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP is a pre-eminent 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 Beijing, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Munich, Singapore, Tokyo, and Washington, DC.
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.