Macfarlanes and Lovells head up £25m Friends Reunited sell-off
City heavyweights Macfarlanes and Lovells have scored advisory roles on ITV's sell-off of social networking site Friends Reunited for just £25m. Macfarlanes corporate partner Nicola Richards has advised the acquirer, online technology and publishing business brightsolid, and its Dundee-based owner DC Thomson, which is one of Scotland's biggest privately-owned media and publishing groups.
August 11, 2009 at 11:01 AM
2 minute read
City heavyweights Macfarlanes and Lovells have scored advisory roles on ITV's sell-off of social networking site Friends Reunited for just £25m.
Macfarlanes corporate partner Nicola Richards has advised the acquirer, online technology and publishing business brightsolid, and its Dundee-based owner DC Thomson, which is one of Scotland's biggest privately-owned media and publishing groups.
Richards was assisted by corporate assistants William David and Alex Edmondson and e-commerce lawyer Sarah Needham.
The deal consolidates brightsolid's 2007 acquisition of online genealogy business Find My Past, on which Macfarlanes also advised.
ITV turned to longstanding adviser Lovells, where corporate partner Tom Whelan took the lead role. ITV acquired Friends Reunited in 2005 for £120m, with Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer corporate partner Simon Marchant taking the lead role for ITV on that occasion. Both Freshfields and Lovells advised ITV the following year on a failed takeover approach by a consortium comprising Apax, Goldman Sachs and Blackstone.
Commenting on the deal, Richards said: "We are delighted to have acted for our longstanding client DC Thomson on this latest acquisition, which was negotiated in a very tight timetable and drew on our expertise across a number of technical areas including e-commerce and data handling."
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