DLA Piper has been advising Doosan Power Systems Ltd. on the acquisition of a majority shareholding in AE&E Lentjes GmbH from the insolvency administrator of AE&E Deutschland GmbH. As part of the transaction, Doosan Power Systems acquired 99 per cent of the shares in the company, which will henceforth be operating as “Doosan Lentjes GmbH”.
Peter Jark, head of the German Restructuring practice of DLA Piper, comments: “Due to the separation of the company from the insolvent A-TEC Group, it was necessary to consider complex aspects of insolvency law.”
Corporate partner Dr Martin Schulte points out: “Through our international presence and under the leadership of DLA Piper in Germany, in close consultation with colleagues in the top Korean law firm of Kim & Chang, we were able to offer the client a uniform and clearly structured handling of the transaction which enabled success to be achieved in the structured sales process and in competition with other bidders.”
Doosan Power Systems is the sector in which the South Korean Doosan conglomerate pools its energy and power station technology in Europe and America. The company’s product portfolio ranges from turnkey power stations, via individual components such as boilers and turbines, to nuclear technology and renewable energy sources. Acquisition of the majority shareholding in Lentjes raises Doosan Power Systems to one of the leading international suppliers of circulating fluidized bed combustion boilers and flue gas cleaning plants for power plants.
Lentjes was part of the AE&E Deutschland Group, which belonged to the insolvent Austrian A-TEC Group. Headquartered in Ratingen near Düsseldorf, the company has a long tradition and is a global supplier of process technology and plant engineering for power stations. The product portfolio particularly features technologies for energy production from fossil and renewable energies as well as for waste incineration.
The core team of DLA Piper under the management of partners Dr Martin Schulte (Corporate, Cologne) and Peter Jark (Restructuring, Berlin) also included senior associate Dr Jan Stoppel (Corporate, Cologne), as well as the expert in plant engineering Dr Markus Beaumart (partner, Real Estate, Cologne), Dr Jan Dreyer (partner, Antitrust, Cologne) and Martin Heinsius (partner, Tax, Frankfurt), Max Becker (partner, Corporate, Vienna), Edward Griffiths (partner, Corporate, London), Barbara van Hussen (partner, Corporate, Amsterdam), Caroline Daout (partner, Corporate, Brussels), Maxim van Buggenhout (Corporate, Brussels), Jaroslav Tajbr (senior associate, Intellectual Property & Technology, Prague), Timo Betjemann (senior associate, Corporate, Cologne), Simon Weber (associate, Restructuring, Berlin) as well as other colleagues from various DLA Piper offices.
At the beginning of 2011, DLA Piper had already advised the Swiss StarragHeckert-Holding AG on the takeover of the Dörries Scharmann Group, which also belonged to the insolvent A-TEC corporation.
