5 years of GDPR: 4th edition of the GDPR Enforcement Tracker Report is now available

We are very pleased to share with you the second edi­tion of the CMS European Private Equity Study 2023.This study ana­lyses hun­dreds of Private Equity deals that we ad­vised on in 2022 and pre­vi­ous years, provid­ing unique in­sights in­to mar­ket trends and dif­fer­ences between private equity and trade deals. Key find­ings: Deal activ­ity re­mained strong un­til Q3 2022, but ex­per­i­enced a sig­ni­fic­ant drop in Q4.New in­vest­ments ac­coun­ted for 85% of PE deals ana­lysed, with few­er exits and sec­ond­ary buy-outs in 2022 com­pared to 2021.Bid­ding pro­cesses de­creased in 2022, po­ten­tially due to less in­volve­ment of PE funds on the sell-side.Entry in­to new mar­kets was the most com­mon deal driver (64% of deals), while di­git­al­isa­tion was no longer a deal driver­Tech­no­logy, me­dia, and tele­coms (TMT) was the busiest sec­tor, fol­lowed by Real Es­tate & Con­struc­tion and life sci­ences.Use of MAC clauses de­creased to 10% in 2022, com­pared to 15% in 2021.Few­er FDI ap­provals or clear­ances were sought in 2022 (8%) com­pared to 2021 (15%).W&I in­sur­ance played a prom­in­ent role in PE M&A trans­ac­tions, in­creas­ing with deal value.Locked box mech­an­isms for set­ting pur­chase price were pre­ferred in 80% of PE deals, while pur­chase price ad­just­ments de­creased.Earn-out pro­vi­sions in­creased over­all in 2022 but were more com­mon in smal­ler deals than high­er value deals.ESG con­sid­er­a­tions have not yet fea­tured in leg­al due di­li­gence or trans­ac­tion doc­u­ments.Man­age­ment in­cent­ive schemes saw short­er vest­ing peri­ods, in­creased man­age­ment al­loc­a­tion, but tightened leav­er pro­vi­sions.Over­all, there were buy­er-friendly de­vel­op­ments in some deal met­rics, such as the use of "tip­ping" bas­kets.

Co­logne – Co­logne-based SaaS start-up Sastri­fy has com­pleted a Series B round of fin­an­cing and raised a total of USD 32 mil­lion. In ad­di­tion to new in­vestors such as ven­ture cap­it­al in­vestors En­deit...

European data pro­tec­tion au­thor­it­ies im­posed fines totalling over 2.7 bil­lion euros in more than 1,500 pub­licly known cases for vi­ol­a­tions of the Gen­er­al Data Pro­tec­tion Reg­u­la­tion, which has been in...

A warm wel­come... ...to the fourth edi­tion of the GDPR En­force­ment Track­er Re­port – the an­niversary edi­tion cel­eb­rat­ing five years of GDPR.In the five years since the GDPR be­came ap­plic­able its power­ful frame­work for im­pos­ing fines has cer­tainly helped to raise aware­ness and en­cour­age com­pli­ance ef­forts – just as the European le­gis­lat­or in­ten­ded. At the same time, the risk of fines of up to EUR 20 mil­lion or 4% of a com­pany’s glob­al an­nu­al turnover can also lead to fear and re­luct­ance or ig­nor­ance about com­pli­ance is­sues.We still be­lieve that facts are bet­ter than fear.This is why we con­tinu­ously up­date our list of pub­licly known fines in the GDPR  En­force­ment Track­er and star­ted the GDPR En­force­ment Track­er Re­port as an an­nu­al deep dive ap­proach to provide you with more in­sights in­to the world of GDPR fines.As in the three pre­vi­ous edi­tions, the GDPR En­force­ment Track­er Re­port starts with the Ex­ec­ut­ive Sum­mary (also avail­able as a PDF ver­sion), fol­lowed by the “Num­bers and Fig­ures” sec­tion and the “En­force­ment In­sights per busi­ness sec­tor” (also in­clud­ing the over­arch­ing em­ploy­ment cat­egory. The “En­force­ment In­sights per coun­try” provide back­ground on the spe­cif­ic en­force­ment frame­work un­der na­tion­al law. Some re­marks on our meth­od­o­logy can be found at the very end of the re­port.

1. In­tro­duc­tion An in­surer can un­der­take in­sur­ance activ­it­ies in the Fed­er­al Re­pub­lic of Ger­many with an in­sur­ance li­cence gran­ted by the Fed­er­al Fin­an­cial Su­per­vis­ory Au­thor­ity (BaFin). BaFin can grant...