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EUR 530m Apollo hotels acquisition marks major Event in sector

Annual Review 2017-2018

June 2018

In one of the biggest European hotels deals of 2017, Invesco Real Estate and CMS client Event Hotels acquired a portfolio of 13 hotels across Germany and the Netherlands from Apollo Global Management for EUR 530m.

This highly complex deal involved three different equity mandates: the European Hotel Fund (38%), a UK separate account mandate (26%) and a joint venture with a Dutch and Danish institutional investor (36%).

Invesco simultaneously entered into a joint venture agreement with Cologne-based Event Hotels as minority co-investor of the property owning companies. Furthermore, Event Hotels purchased the operating companies of the whole business.

A cross-border CMS team of lawyers from our Cologne, Amsterdam, Berlin and Munich offices advised Event on the deal.

According to CMS Cologne partner Herbert Wiehe, the client relationship partner for Event and lead partner of the entire transaction, “This was an extremely demanding deal, both in terms of the competing investor interests and in the complexities of separating the operating businesses from the property-owning businesses within the portfolio.”

CMS Cologne partner Klaus Jäger, who led the Corporate and M & A part of the deal, added, “Besides a complex restructuring of the sellers group, we had to finalise various purchase agreements and shareholder agreements with three different equity investors at the negotiating table in around ten weeks. Each hotel also has its own franchise agreement to which each party had to agree. This timescale is extremely tight for a deal of this size and complexity to be successfully negotiated.

“Event is very active in the Hotels sector in the Netherlands and Germany and we have built a trusted relationship over a number of years. Hotel operators increasingly require multipractice, multioffice sector specialists and this fits well with CMS and our philosophy.”

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