Aple­ona ac­quires Siemens Ge­bäu­de­m­an­age­ment und -Ser­vices (SGS). CMS Vi­enna provides com­pre­hens­ive leg­al sup­port to Siemens Aus­tria.   Siemens Aus­tria has agreed to sell Siemens Ge­bäu­de­m­an­age­ment & -Ser­vices G.m.b.H. (SGS) to Aple­ona. The clos­ing of the trans­ac­tion is ex­pec­ted in the third quarter of the fin­an­cial year and is sub­ject to cus­tom­ary an­ti­trust ap­provals. Both com­pan­ies have main­tained a good and close re­la­tion­ship for years. SGS will be fur­ther strengthened by join­ing forces with Aple­ona, res­ult­ing in an ex­pan­ded and im­proved range of ser­vices.   Siemens Aus­tria is be­ing leg­ally ad­vised and sup­por­ted by the Vi­en­nese law firm CMS Reich-Rohr­wig Hainz un­der the lead­er­ship of Al­ex­an­der Rakosi, part­ner in the Cor­por­ate/M&A de­part­ment. The core CMS team fur­ther con­sists of M&A ex­perts Flori­an May­er, Mar­ie-Christine Lidl, Anna Hiegel­sper­ger and Mat­thi­as Emich. Sibylle Novak and Al­ex­an­der Hier­mann deal with tax law is­sues, An­drea Potz, and Jens Winter as­sist on la­bour law top­ics and Bernt Els­ner and Mar­lene Wim­mer-Nistel­ber­ger ad­vise on com­pet­i­tion law. Ad­di­tion­al sup­port dur­ing the course of the trans­ac­tion came from Daniela Ka­rol­lus-Bru­ner, Robert Keisler, Di­eter Zand­ler and Clem­ens Gross­may­er.   Al­ex­an­der Rakosi is pleased with the suc­cess­ful deal sign­ing: “We are proud to be able to sup­port Siemens on this pro­ject with a cross-de­part­ment­al team and con­trib­ute to fur­ther en­trench­ing Siemens as a fo­cused tech­no­logy com­pany in Aus­tria.”   Siemens Ge­bäu­de­m­an­age­ment & -Ser­vices ¬G.m.b.H., based in Vi­enna, is a suc­cess­ful man­u­fac­turer-in­de­pend­ent full-ser­vice pro­vider in the tech­nic­al build­ing¬ man­age­ment¬ sec­tor with around 260 em­ploy­ees. Its cus­tom­ers in­clude in­sti­tu­tions from the health care, cul­ture and edu­ca­tion, trade and lo­gist­ics sec­tors, as well as renowned com­mer­cial en­ter­prises. In the last busi­ness year, it achieved a turnover of around 75 mil­lion euros.

The in­ter­na­tion­ally act­ive spe­cial­ist in re­cyc­ling and pack­aging solu­tions AL­PLA is adding to its already broad product port­fo­lio. AL­PLA was ad­vised by CMS again on its re­cent ac­quis­i­tion of Wolf Plastics Group.

Private an­ti­trust lit­ig­a­tion in Aus­tria has sub­stan­tially in­creased in re­cent years. To a large ex­tent, this growth can be at­trib­uted to an in­crease of car­tel court de­cisions im­pos­ing fines against car­tel mem­bers based on in­tens­i­fied en­force­ment activ­ity of the Aus­tri­an Fed­er­al Com­pet­i­tion Au­thor­ity (FCA) and the Aus­tri­an Fed­er­al Car­tel Pro­sec­utor (with the de­cision in the El­ev­at­ors and Es­cal­at­ors car­tel case be­ing the show-starter). On the basis of these de­cisions find­ing vi­ol­a­tions of an­ti­trust law, the Aus­tri­an Su­preme Court (OGH) in sev­er­al cases has af­firmed the pos­sib­il­ity of claims for dam­ages for dir­ectly dam­aged parties as well as for in­dir­ectly dam­aged parties, in­clud­ing cases where dam­ages were al­legedly caused by car­tel out­siders (um­brella pri­cing).The com­plete "The Private Com­pet­i­tion en­force­ment Re­view" is avail­able via down­load.

Over the past one and a half years, to­geth­er with Pay­ment Ser­vices Aus­tria (PSA), the Oes­ter­reichis­che Na­tion­al­bank (OeNB) (the Aus­tri­an Cent­ral Bank) has laid the found­a­tion for mod­ern­ising the pro­cessing...

Privat­iz­a­tions and PPP pro­jects are es­sen­tial parts of state aid law, each of which is also closely re­lated to the prin­ciples and stand­ards of pub­lic pro­cure­ment law. For each type of pro­ject, it is ne­ces­sary...

Award­ing con­tracts for provid­ing ser­vices in the gen­er­al eco­nom­ic in­terest in­volves both pub­lic pro­cure­ment law and state aid law. For this reas­on, it is ne­ces­sary to ex­am­ine which types of pro­ced­ure...

Mar­lene Wim­mer-Nistel­ber­ger has spent much of her leg­al ca­reer over re­cent years mod­ern­ising and in­nov­at­ing European state aid law, hav­ing also spe­cial­ised in this area as a train­ee law­yer. As a long-stand­ing...

Pack­aging solu­tions pro­vider AL­PLA and Thai PTT Glob­al Chem­ic­al Pub­lic Com­pany entered in­to an agree­ment to es­tab­lish a joint ven­ture to man­u­fac­ture and sell mech­an­ic­ally re­cycled plastics from used pack­aging...