Shearman & Sterling advised Crédit Agricole CIB and Natixis—coordinators of a bank pool including BNP Paribas, Société Générale CIB, CM-CIC, HSBC France and HSBC plc—on the creation of a €285 million senior credit facility for the refinancing of Labeyrie group’s current indebtedness, which coincided with the restructuring of the group’s capital ownership.

In this transaction, majority shareholders from Icelandic agribusiness group Alfesca, head holding company of the Labeyrie group, sold all of their shares in the group to the Basque cooperative company Lur Berri. Lur Berri, already a shareholder of the leading foie gras and smoked salmon marketer in France (with a turnover of € 700 million), increased its ownership stake from 49.9% to 62.9%. This sale also came as LBO France, a French fund, acquired its first stake (of 33%) in the French intermediate holding company Financière de Kiel (renamed Labeyrie Fine Foods). The management team owns the remaining 3.8% of the group’s capital.

The transaction was financed through a pool of 13 banks. The mezzanine debt facility was arranged by Cerea Mezzanine, Unigrains and BNP Paribas.

The Shearman & Sterling team included a Finance team of partner Arnaud Fromion and Frédéric Guilloux, Nathalie Barzilai and Lu Chen in Paris and partner Mei Lian and Sarah Brufal and Philip Stopford in London and a Tax team of partner Niels Dejean and Anne-Sophie Maes in Paris and counsel Simon Letherman and James Leslie in London.