Pinsent Masons and Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom have won lead roles on the £1.4bn sale of Skyscanner.
The travel search website has been bought by the Chinese travel service Ctrip, continuing the trend of UK-headquartered assets being acquired by Asian buyers.
Scottish-headquartered Skyscanner sought advice from Pinsent Masons partners Alan Diamond and Rosalie Chadwick, based in Edinburgh and Glasgow respectively.
The acquirer Ctrip meanwhile turned to US firm Skadden, which fielded a predominantly London-based team led by partner John Adebiyi.
Under the terms of the acquisition, the £1.4bn will be made mainly in cash, with the remainder consisting of Ctrip ordinary shares and loan notes. Skadden US securities lawyers handled the matter from Beijing.
The US firm outsourced employee incentives work to Travers Smith partner Mahesh Varia.
Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson acted as US securities counsel to Skyscanner, with a team including New York and Washington DC partners Brian Miner and Josh Wechsler.
The deal is expected to close at the end of 2016, with the Skyscanner management team continuing to manage operations independently as part of the Ctrip group. Skyscanner’s legal team is led by chief legal officer Carolyn Jameson and senior legal counsel Graeme Barron.
Background to the deal
Both Pinsent Masons and Skadden are longstanding advisers to Skyscanner and Ctrip respectively. Pinsents acts on the majority of the company’s corporate and commercial work, while real estate matters are understood to be handled by Morton Fraser.
Meanwhile Skadden partner Adebiyi, who was formerly head of the firm’s Hong Kong office, has acted on multiple transactions for Ctrip in the past. In 2015, Adebiyi worked on the acquisition of a 70 per cent stake in UK-based Travelfusion for $160m.
Skyscanner’s sale to an Asian buyer follows the sale of ARM Holdings to Japanese telecommunications company Softbank for £24bn over the summer. China National Chemical Corporation’s (ChemChina) has also been particularly acquisitive in the West, buying Syngenta for $43bn, as well as German industrial machinery maker KraussMaffei Group and Italian tyre company Pirelli.
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