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CMS advises Shearwater on $650m cross-border acquisition

27 November 2018

A cross-border CMS team internally led by CMS London has advised Norwegian marine seismic services provider, Shearwater GeoServices, in its $650m cross-border acquisition of the marine seismic acquisition assets and operations of WesternGeco.

The acquisition carved WesternGeco’s assets and operations out in more than 15 countries and included transactional support from CMS offices in Angola, Brazil, China, France, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Russia, Singapore and UAE plus the coordination of other external law firms out of CMS London. CMS advised in a wide range of areas, including the multi-jurisdictional due diligence exercise, the different carve-out steps, obtaining competition authorities approval and transferring shares in different countries. Shearwater now owns and operates a fleet of 14 fully equipped seismic vessels, offering a full range of seismic acquisition services globally.

Congratulations to the multi-jurisdictional CMS team advising on the transaction, led in London by Peter Lewis, with invaluable support from Brynn Horner, Ivan Martinelli, Isabelle Harris and Nyambura Kiarie (Transactions), Rachael Visick (Asset Finance), Joel Vertes, Fionnuala Rice and Ella Wells (IP), John Markham, Brian Sher and Kabir Garyali (Competition), David Rutherford and Alice Brooks (Oil and Gas), Sally Badham, David Abel, Pierluigi Pagliuca and Catherine Lee (Real Estate).

Outside the UK, our team was ably supported by CMS colleagues Filipa Tavares de Lima (Angola), Ted Rhodes and Rita Zanforlin (Brazil), Nick Beckett and Daisy He (China), Jean-Baptiste Thiénot and Victoire Delloye (France), Paolo Scarduelli (Italy), Giancarlo Schievenini, Gabriel Salinas and others (Mexico), Rogier de Very and Bob van Zijl (Netherlands), Vladimir Zenin, Maxim Boulba, Anton Bankovskiy and Maria Ermolaeva (Russia), Toby Grainger, Christopher Kang and Eric Lai (Singapore) and John O’Connor (UAE).