Hay & Kilner's Corporate Partner Mark Adams shares his recent insights for businesses in the run-up to the Autumn Budget.
Partner and head of the Corporate Team at Hay & Kilner, Mark Adams has specialised in corporate mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transactional work for over 20 years.
Here, he shares his insights over the last six months, and a look ahead post-Budget.
From business and company sales and acquisitions, to refinancing and group reorganisations, we are proud to work with a wide range of businesses on all aspects of their corporate transactions and business needs. We like to think our team provides experienced, friendly and pragmatic advice to help each of our clients on their business journey, whatever stage they may be at.
Over the last six months at Hay & Kilner, we’ve certainly experienced an acceleration of management buyout (MBO) plans in particular, which has had a positive impact on deal activity, and we’ve also seen, and been involved in, some significant deals for the region.
One of those, and one of our recent highlights, was the 42m-Euro sale of AceOdds, where we acted for the selling shareholders of their i-gaming business to a large Danish sports media group, Better Collective A/S – a transaction that we were grateful to win the Insider Magazine Deal of the Month award for.
From speaking with our clients, we’ve found that a significant amount of recent activity has been influenced by some uncertainty surrounding potential changes to capital gains tax rates and Business Asset Disposal Relief (BADR) in the upcoming Autumn Budget. This has led several of our clients to bring forward their plans and, as a result, we’ve recently completed a number of transactions ahead of schedule, and we’re currently working towards completing a number of MBO’s prior to the Budget on 30th October.
Future challenges
So, what should we be looking out for? The Prime Minister has already laid the groundwork for some tax increases after warning the Budget will be “painful”, but we don’t yet know for certain how “painful” or what those changes will look like.
If some of the rumoured predictions become reality, it could mean higher capital gains tax liabilities for those selling their companies, but we’ll obviously need to see what happens on 30th October.
I’m sure business owners and professional advisors will all be watching out for further information and announcements in the run-up to the Budget, and we of course don’t yet know whether any changes will take effect immediately, or after some sort of grace period, in order to enable sellers to take advantage of current tax rates.
As ever, we’d advise our clients to continue to take specialist advice from all of their professional advisors, whether that be tax, accounting, legal or otherwise, in order to try and best mitigate whatever tax changes are announced next month.
For further information on corporate legal matters, please contact Mark Adams at Hay & Kilner LLP on 0191 232 8345 or via mark.adams@hay-kilner.co.uk