WILLKOMMEN

Astrea Banking & Finance Partner Dieter Veestraeten has contributed the Belgian Chapter 33 of the International Comparative Legal Guide (ICLG) to Lending & Secured Finance 2019 (7th edition).

This guide provides corporate counsel and international practitioners with a comprehensive worldwide legal analysis of the laws and regulations of lending and secured finance.  The Country Question and Answer Chapters give a broad overview of common issues in the laws and regulations of this practice area in 51 jurisdictions.

All chapters are written by leading lending and secured finance lawyers and industry specialists. 

Read the complete chapter written by Dieter Veestraeten: ICLG Lending & Secured Finance - Chapter 33: Belgium.

Technology and M&A partner Steven De Schrijver has contributed an article entitled “Open Source Software: how to avoid its perils in M&A?” to the Expert Guide: Mergers & Acquisitions 2019 which was published by Corporate LiveWire.

Open Source Software (OSS) has become widespread in mod­ern software development. In this article, Steven discusses the issues and complications surrounding this important technological development which must be carefully considered when entering into an M&A deal.

Corporate LiveWire’s Expert Guides feature contributions from industry experts from around the globe covering topics such as regulatory changes and compliance issues, interesting trends and opportunities, regional or national market composition, and recent or landmark case studies. The Expert Guide: Mergers & Acquisitions provides business owners and investors with an insight on recent developments within the area and offers extensive analysis across various industries whilst also being used as a resource for reference both now, and in the future.

Read here Steven’s full article on Open Source Software.

Astrea partners Dieter Veestraeten and Steven De Schrijver have advised on the Belgian law aspects of a transaction involving the signing of an agreement on the sale of 100% of the shares in UNITANK to DIF’s Core Infrastructure Fund I and Aberdeen Standard Investments’ SL Capital Infrastructure II SCSp.

You can read the full article on this transaction here.

Astrea was pleased to advise DoubleVerify Inc., headquartered in New York, and its private equity backer Providence Equity Partners, one of the world’s premier private equity firms and a leading investor specialized in the media, communications, education and information industries, on its acquisition of Zentrick, a Belgian digital video technology company that provides middleware solutions to drive the seamless execution and performance of online video advertising for the world’s largest brands, platforms and publishers. DoubleVerify Inc. is the leading independent provider of marketing measurement software and analytics in a rapidly-growing market segment. The transaction was completed as an all cash, all stock offer on 15 February 2019.

A press release with regard to this transaction can be found here: https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/02/20/1738072/0/en/DoubleVerify-Acquires-Digital-Video-Technology-Company-Zentrick.html.

The Astrea team was led by Steven De Schrijver, who has built a strong reputation on Belgian tech M&A transactions over the last 25 years. Some of his other recent transactions include the investment by Horizon Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Hong Kong, in the Belgian start-up Cloudalize, a cloud platform for running GPU-accelerated applications on demand, and (together with finance partner Dieter Veestraeten) the acquisition by Alpina Capital Partners LLP, an owner-managed, independent technology investment firm with approximately €300m in assets under management, of a majority interest in Objective International, a well-established Belgian company specialized in the process and discrete manufacturing execution system (“MES”) and warehouse management system (“WMS”) sector. Objective is a new addition to Germanedge, Alpina Partners’ buy-and-build strategy in the MES space.