With the arrival of private equity specialists Mark Aschenbrenner as a partner and senior associate Samuel Frommelt, international law firm Clifford Chance has further boosted its advisory capacities and profile in Munich. The additions greatly contribute to the strategic refocusing of the firm’s Munich team with an increased focus on private equity as well as finance and capital markets advice.

While Volkmar Bruckner joined Clifford Chance as a new private equity partner in Munich earlier this summer, Mark Aschenbrenner and Samuel Frommelt have now completed the high profile team from Kirkland & Ellis. The three new hires are also a substantial boost to the firm’s German and international Corporate/M&A team.

Parallel to adding the new private equity team to its Munich base, Clifford Chance has also further strengthened its international market-leading finance and capital markets practice in Germany by bringing together four experienced specialists at the Munich office: finance and project finance specialist Jared Grubb and funds and capital markets advisor Gregor Evenkamp as partners, as well as English-Italian-German qualified finance lawyer David Neu and capital markets specialist and tech expert Axel Wittmann as counsels.

With a focus on the Munich finance community as well as on European and global projects, these substantial strategic additions to Clifford Chance’s Munich office provide an even broader and more efficient transactional and financing practice for financial investors and other financial and capital markets players.

Peter Dieners, Regional Managing Partner of Clifford Chance in Germany, comments: “With these great additions who are a perfect fit with our people and expertise, we are accelerating our push in the top segment of the German market much faster than planned. Our important Munich presence is bursting with ambition following the team’s successful refocus and is now brilliantly playing to our strengths in all very large private equity and capital markets projects locally as well as internationally.”

Nicole Englisch, M&A specialist and Office Managing Partner at Clifford Chance in Munich, says: “The strategic realignment and the outstanding new additions to our Munich office help us advise our clients with even more power in the most relevant focus areas of corporate finance, capital markets, private equity and high yield as well as technology topics.”

Clifford Chance’s German and global private equity and financial markets teams provide market-leading expertise to financial investors and funds as well as corporates, banks and institutions across the full range of their activities in Europe, the Middle East, Asia Pacific and the US. The firm’s German teams have advised clients on these high-profile recent transactions:

• Investor consortium of OMERS Infrastructure, Goldman Sachs Asset Management and AXA IM Alts on the acquisition of the leading provider of medical diagnostics services amedes from Antin Infrastructure;
• Medical diagnostics and laboratory services provider Synlab as well as financial investors Cinven, OTPP and Novo Holdings on Synlab’s IPO at Frankfurt Stock Exchange;
• Travel tech company HomeToGo on its planned merger with Lakestar SPAC I SE to form a listed company;
• Permira on the acquisition of leading European CNS specialty pharma company Neuraxpharm from Apax;
• Triton on its acquisition of premium kitchen supplier SCHOCK from IK Investment Partners;
• UniCredit on the acquisition of a loan portfolio from Hamburg Commercial Bank with a nominal value of up to €700 million;
• Siemens on the issuance of the company’s largest-ever $10 billion bond, including a private placement in the US markets – the second-largest US dollar financing by a German company since 2000;
• Deutsche Glasfaser on a new €225 million syndicated loan facility for its FttB (Fibre to the Building) segment;

• PolyPeptide Group on its IPO on the Swiss SIX Swiss Exchange – one of the largest IPOs in Switzerland in recent years.