Cologne – LAWFUEL – The Law Newswire – DLA Piper, the major international legal services organisation, advises the Klöckner Pentaplast Group (“Klöckner Pentaplast”), headquartered in Montabaur, in relation to its acquisition by the US private equity investor Blackstone. The sale is subject to approval by various regulatory authorities.

European private equity firm Cinven and its minority partner CCMP LLC, sold Klöckner Pentaplast, which they acquired in 2001, for a reported purchase price of €1.3 billion. The management of the Klöckner Pentaplast Group will remain in place.

The Klöckner Pentaplast Group, the world’s leading producer of films for pharmaceutical, medical device, food, electronics, and general-purpose thermoform packaging, as well as printing and specialty applications, has sales of over €1.2 billion and employs more than 3,400 people worldwide.

DLA Piper advised The Klöckner Pentaplast Group on several transactions in the recent past, among other things on the sale of the “flexible film” business to the Wihuri Group as well as the acquisition of the “PVC film” business of Supreme Industries Limited in India.

DLA Piper Corporate partner Abdul Aziz Al-Yaqout said: “This is a very interesting deal because of the number of jurisdictions involved and resources which had to be pulled together to make it work on short notice.”

The DLA Piper team in Cologne was led by partner Abdul Aziz Al-Yaqout (Corporate) and comprised associates Dr Katia Niemann (Corporate), Jens-Peter Eickhoff (Corporate), Dr Tobias Kruse (Corporate), Dr Fabian Hinrichs (Real Estate), Julia Hardeweg (Employment), Dr Markus Kamp (Employment), Saskia Lais (TMC) and Dr Kai Tumbrägel (TMC) an. In addition DLA Piper and DLA Piper Group lawyers in Australia, China, England and Wales, France, Italy, Hong Kong, Russian Federation, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and Thailand, as well as six associated law firms were involved in the transaction.

LawFuel – Lead story – Close contacts at Dow Jones say that David K P Li, a business leader from Hong Kong and longtime director of Dow Jones, is the subject of an intensifying investigation into allegations of insider trading in Dow Jones stock.

Like David Rockefeller in the United States and a succession of Rothschilds in Europe, David K.P. Li has long received the accolades that come to aristocratic bankers who combine wealth, political influence and public service.

Li is a cabinet official here, a senior member of the legislature and the chairman and chief executive of the Bank of East Asia, the flagship of the Li family’s business empire. And he has been leading Hong Kong’s recent campaign to establish itself as Asia’s main financial center.

So it has been all the more surprising that American regulators are expected to examine whether Li had any role in the possible leak of confidential information to a Hong Kong couple accused of making millions of dollars from insider trading of shares in Dow Jones.

Li, a longtime director of Dow Jones, publisher of The Wall Street Journal, has not been accused of any wrongdoing, and has denied leaking any information about a pending bid by News Corp. for Dow Jones. But people close to Dow Jones said that the company had opened an internal review of his actions, in a case that highlights the dangers that accompany the perks of being a company director.