internationalWKB lawyers provided legal advice to Netrisk Group on the merger with Bauer Media Group’s online comparison business. Working alongside lead counsel for Netrisk Group, Szecskay, and Latham & Watkins (which acted as a lead counsel for TA Associates), WKB played an important role in the transaction, conducting a comprehensive legal due diligence of the Rankomat Group and supporting negotiations on Polish law aspects of transaction documents.
The merger resulted in the consolidation of Bauer Media Group’s online comparison business, including rankomat.pl (Poland), epojisteni.cz, and srovnejto.cz (Czech Republic), and superpoistenie.sk (Slovakia), with Netrisk Group’s business, including Netrisk.hu (Hungary), durchblicker.at (Austria), Klik.cz (Czech Republic), Netfinancie.sk (Slovakia), and edrauda.lt (Lithuania).
The expanded Netrisk Group now serves a larger market for price comparison services, holding leadership positions across Poland, Austria, Hungary, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Lithuania, reaching approximately 80 million potential customers across CEE.
The complexity of the transaction primarily stemmed from two main factors: (i) the highly regulated nature of the business areas involved and (ii) the need for legal input across eight different jurisdictions, namely Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, Germany, Lithuania, and Luxembourg. Managing and navigating through the regulatory intricacies and legal frameworks across these diverse regions required a comprehensive and adept legal approach.
The M&A team at WKB, led by Jakub Jędrzejak and Dominik Kulpa, with contributions from Ben Davey and Olga Tajak, offered general transaction support.
The due diligence process involved an interdisciplinary team of WKB lawyers, including Anna Fennig, Joanna Staroszczyk and Anna Oleś (corporate); Marta Warzańska (regulatory); Paweł Koziełło (litigation), Agata Miętek PhD and Jakub Powichrowski (employment); Marta Czarnecka and Marta Pałyga (real estate), Anna Urbańczyk and Marek Prętki (insurance); Julia Jewgraf (IP), and Aleksandra Jusik (GDPR).
Netrisk Group operates online platforms for comparing and distributing several types of non-life insurance products, as well as certain non-insurance products, from retail loans and energy contracts to telephony solutions.
Bauer Media Group is an international media company holding leading positions in publishing and audio across Europe, investing in other business areas such as newspapers and online comparison platforms.
