Herbert Smith advised Apache North Sea Limited, a subsidiary of Houston based Apache Corporation, on its agreement to acquire the North Sea oil & gas assets of Exxon Mobil Corporation’s Mobil North Sea LLC for US$1.75 billion which was signed 21 September 2011.

This transaction is expected to expand significantly Apache’s footprint in the North Sea which commenced with the acquisition of the Forties Field in 2003 and on which Herbert Smith also advised. 

The Herbert Smith team assisting Apache was led by corporate energy partner Stephen Murray, the head of Herbert Smith’s global oil & gas practice, and senior associate Alastair Young. 

Stephen Murray commented:

“We were delighted to be instructed by Apache Corporation on this major transaction. Apache has a fantastic deal-doing reputation and it was great to have the opportunity to support their highly experienced in-house legal and commercial deal team on concluding the agreement with Exxon.”

The team also included corporate energy partner Steven Dalton and associates David Stinson, Mitasha Chandok and Colin Tinto (corporate energy), partner Isaac Zailer and senior associate Will Arrenberg (tax), partner Andrew Taggart (employment) and senior associate David Coulling (transition services) with additional support from Herbert Smith’s competition, real estate and environment teams.

Biggart Baillie LLC in Scotland provided Scottish real estate advice to Apache.

The deal ends a bumper summer for Herbert Smith’s London energy team, coming off the back of the successful conclusion of a number of recent downstream deals, including Chevron’s sale of its UK and Ireland refining and marketing business to Valero Energy, Essar’s acquisition of the Stanlow refinery from Shell (both of which closed in August) and BP’s disposal of its downstream fuel marketing businesses in Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Malawi and Tanzania, the last of which closed at the beginning of September.