Simpson Thacher & Bartlett and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz have taken lead roles on buyout house Apax Partners' sale of Tommy Hilfiger to US clothing giant Phillips-Van Heusen for $3bn (£1.9bn).

The sale comes around four years after Apax purchased Tommy Hilfiger for $1.6bn (£1.1bn) and took the company private.

Wachtell is advising Phillips-Van Heusen on its acquisition, with the role coming after the elite firm advised Tommy Hilfiger on the 2006 deal. Partner Andrew Nussbaum led the Wachtell team on that transaction.

Simpson Thacher advised Apax, a regular client of the firm, with partners Ryerson Symons and Robert Spatt leading the firm's team along with partner Kenneth Wallach.

Benelux firm Stibbe also took a role for Apax and Tommy Hilfiger, fielding a team led by Amsterdam-based managing partner Heleen Kersten and Derk Lemstra, the head of the firm's financial markets group.

The key elements of the new deal came together quickly, after the parties spent much of last week in Wachtell's offices closing various components of the deal, including Phillips-Van Heusen's move to issue $200m (£132.5m) in preferred shares to LNK Partners and MSD Capital.

Phillips-Van Heusen will issue another $200m of shares, but the bulk of the financing will come from nearly $2.5bn (£1.7bn) in bank loans the company is in the process of arranging.

Weil Gotshal & Manges also advised on the latest deal, with corporate partner David Zeltner advising Tommy Hilfiger himself on the sale. Weil's Jeffrey Weinberg, who recently retired as a partner and moved to a senior counsel role, struck up the firm's relationship with Hilfiger several years ago.

Other Weil lawyers on the team include tax partner Andrew Gaines and intellectual property partner Jeffrey Osterman.

Other Wachtell partners on the deal for Phillips-Van Heusen are: corporate partner Gregory Ostling; antitrust partner Ilene Gotts; executive compensation partner Michael Segal; restructuring partner Eric Rosof; and tax partners Jodi Schwartz and Joshua Holmes.

This article first appeared on The Am Law Daily blog on americanlawyer.com.

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