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There was no shortage of recognizable firms involved in two major deals early this week, as  eBay has sold off its classified ads business to Norwegian firm Adevinta ASA for $9.2 billion and Chevron announced it would acquire troubled hydrocarbon exploration firm Noble Energy for $5 billion. 

Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom; Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton were all involved in the eBay/Adevinta deal. Vinson & Elkins; Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison; and Shearman & Sterling handled the Chevron/Noble Energy transaction.

Skadden, which represented Adevinta, was led by London corporate partners Lorenzo Corte, Denis Klimentchenko and Scott Simpson; London leveraged finance partner Peter Coulton and New York tax partner David Rievman. 

Wachtell was counsel to eBay, and was led by corporate partners Daniel Neff, Karessa Cain and Raaj Narayan; executive compensation partner Erica Bonnett; restructuring and finance partner John Sobolewski and tax partners Eiko Stange and Rachel Reisberg. All partners are located in New York. 

Cleary handled the antitrust end of things for Schibsted ASA, the majority shareholder for Adevinta, as well as Adevinta itself. The Cleary team working solely with Schibsted was led by M&A partners Benet O'Reilly, Nallini Puri and Pierre-Marie Boury. The team working with both Schibsted and Adevinta was led by antitrust partner Francisco Enrique Gonzalex-Diaz. 

Paul Weiss represented Chevron in its $5 billion acquisition of Noble, led by corporate partners Scott Barshay and Kyle Seifried. 

Vinson & Elkins represented Noble Energy, led by corporate partners Steve Gill and Doug McWilliams; tax partners Lina Dimachkieh and Todd Way; executive compensation partner David D'Alessandro; labor and employment partner Tom Wilson; compliance partner Fry Wernick; antitrust and regulatory partner Hill Wellford; oil and gas partner Bryan Locke; environmental partner Matt Dobbins and governance partner Michale Holmes. 

Shearman handled antitrust matters for Chevron, with D.C.-based partners David Higbee and Ben Gris leading the way. 

The eBay/Adevinta deal creates an advertising juggernaut in an industry that continues to see consolidation. As part of the transaction, eBay is getting $2.5 billion in cash and 540 million Adevinta shares. The deal makes eBay a 44% owner of Adevinta, with a 33.3% voting stake.

Reuters reported late last week that eBay had called an emergency board meeting last Friday in order to sort out a bidding situation between eventual buyer Adevinta and Dutch firm Prosus and a private equity consortium also intent on acquiring the business. Sources close to the deal said Prosus was being represented by David Mercado from Cravath, Swaine & Moore and the private equity consortium, comprised of Hellman & Friedman, Blackstone and Permira, were represented by Sebastian Fain and Ethan Klingsberg of Freshfields, Bruckhaus & Deringer. 

While smaller in scale, the Chevron/Noble deal is a welcome sign for the oil and gas industry, which was crushed by the pandemic and subsequent price drops due to low demand. While oil prices have started to recover, trade publications in the industry are saying that a return to pre-pandemic levels might not happen for another two years. 

Chevron appears to be following the philosophy of Baron Rothschild, who is credited with coining the phrase "the time to buy is when there is blood in the streets." Many oil and gas companies were already highly leveraged in order to maintain operations prior to the pandemic, and the decrease in demand had many, like Noble, hemorrhaging cash.  

But that purchase of opportunity doesn't come without cost. Noble is currently carrying around $8 billion in debt. 

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