Kirkland & Ellis and Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom have represented Nesta Investment Holdings on its proposed $11.6 billion acquisition of Global Logistic Properties (GLP), Asia's biggest warehouse operator, which turned to Morrison & Foerster for advice.
A Chinese private equity consortium, Nesta also tapped WongPartnership for counsel. The consortium is composed of Hopu Investment Management, Hillhouse Capital Management, Bank of China Group Investment (BOCGI), China Vanke, and SMG, which is owned by GLP founder and CEO Ming Mei.
Allen & Gledhill is also involved in the deal, serving as legal counsel to a special committee of independent directors at GLP, which is currently 37 percent owned by Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC. Meanwhile, Davis Polk & Wardwell and Clifford Chance acted for consortium members China Vanke and BOCGI, respectively. CC also advised the lenders, including the mandated lead arrangers to the consortium.
The proposed acquisition will be done via a scheme of arrangement, and the Chinese group plans to delist and take Singapore-listed GLP private, marking Asia's largest private equity buyout in a buoyant sector, reported Reuters. The deal is expected to completed in April next year.
GLP, which has a portfolio of assets worth $41 billion spread across China, Japan, Brazil and the U.S., is benefiting from rising demand logistics facilities driven by a boom in e-commerce from clients such as Amazon.com Inc and JD.com Inc, according to Reuters.
The bid for GLP stands out at a time when China's outbound M&A volumes nearly halved in the first six months of 2017 following Beijing's crackdown on capital outflows, Thomson Reuters data showed, and its new scrutiny of acquisitive groups is set to dampen Asian deal flow further.
The K&E team was led by partners Nicholas Norris, David Irvine, Justin Dolling and Jonathan Tadd. Asia managing partner Eric Piesner and Shirin Tang handled the transaction for MoFo, with support from fellow partners Kenneth Muller and Marcia Ellis.
Skadden's cross-border deal team included partners Julie Gao, Rajeev Duggal, Jonathan Stone, Mitsuhiro Kamiya, Ivan Schlager, Frederic Depoortere, Lynn McGovern, John Adebiyi, Danny Tricot, Karen Corman, Lutz Zimmer, Joseph Yaffe and Pascal Bine.
Davis Polk partners Paul Chow and Li He oversaw the deal for the firm, while the CC team was headed by partners Fang Liu, Timothy Democratis, Lee Taylor and Jeff Berman, as well as banking and finance partners Anthony Wang and Matthew Truman in Hong Kong, and Andrew Brereton in Singapore.
