International law firm CMS has advised PFR Ventures on its investment in three private equity funds; British Apax Partners, French PAI Partners, and Avallon MBO (a Polish fund). The value of PFR Venture’s investment across four private equity firms totals PLN 340 million (EUR 75 million).
PFR Ventures acts as a public investor, allocating resources in venture capital funds and private equity funds, which in turn provide capital to companies at various stages of development. The PFR PE programme has been in place since 2020 and is aimed at accelerating the development of the private equity market in Poland. It is designed for both international funds that intend to invest in Poland and local PE players who plan to expand abroad.
Seven teams have already benefited from the PFR PE programme: Apax Partners, Avallon MBO, Innova, Mezzanine Management, PAI Partners, and Value4Capital. In 2021, PFR Ventures plans to partner with more funds.
Apax Partners is an international private equity fund with European roots, which is behind the growth of companies such as Swiss Orange, Atos and Losberger. PAI Partners, in turn, traces its history back to the early days of Paribas Bank, from which it was spun off. The Polish fund, Avallon MBO, specialises in management buyouts (MBOs). Its portfolio includes Velvet Care, GoodFood (the leader in the rice bread market) and Organic Farma Zdrowia.
“We sincerely congratulate PFR Ventures on its investment in leading private equity funds and we are pleased to have been able to support our client in the execution and successful closing of the transactions. They perfectly demonstrate our ability to run several projects concurrently under great time pressure, with the active involvement of lawyers from our foreign offices. This is also further evidence of our effective combination of experience and transactional, tax and regulatory expertise”, says Błażej Zagórski, the CMS partner coordinating the project.
The scope of CMS’s work included comprehensive transactional, tax and regulatory advice.
CMS’s work for PFR Ventures on the investment in Apax Partners, PAI Partners and Avallon MBO was coordinated by Błażej Zagórski, partner in the transaction team, and Łukasz Dynysiuk, partner in the tax advice team. The team included Michał Sowiński, transactional lawyer, Rafał Dostatni, senior associate from the tax advice team, and Marek Trzos-Rastawiecki, counsel from the banking and finance team, who advised on regulatory issues. In addition, CMS partners from Luxembourg participated in the project: Benjamin Bada, who supported the Polish team from the transactional and regulatory perspective, and Frederic Feyten, who was responsible for tax issues.
For years, PE funds have consistently grown their share in M&A activity in the CEE region. In 2011, they accounted for only 6% of the total volume of deals, rising to nearly one fifth in 2020. According to the M&A Emerging Europe 2020/2021 report, published by CMS in cooperation with EMIS (an analytical company), the Polish market accounted for 99, nearly one-third, of the 319 PE deals announced in the CEE region in 2020. Moreover, last year PE funds accounted for approximately one third of all M&As announced in Poland. What is important for the development of the Polish economy is the fact that the vast majority, i.e. approximately 80%, of the takeovers involving private equity capital in Poland were acquisitions, and only about 20% were exits from investments.
Social Media cookies collect information about you sharing information from our website via social media tools, or analytics to understand your browsing between social media tools or our Social Media campaigns and our own websites. We do this to optimise the mix of channels to provide you with our content. Details concerning the tools in use are in our privacy policy.