Acquisition of a hotel group’s assets under a court-approved sale plan

The situation

Several trading companies within the same group, established in the south of France, were subject to separate proceedings while being linked by complementary assets, namely the buildings, the hotel and restaurant businesses and an authorisation to operate a beach held under a municipal concession. That division between separate entities made the acquisition a particularly delicate exercise, in legal and in operational terms alike, each asset being subject to its own constraints and to the assessment of the court.

The difficulty

The task was not merely to acquire those assets but to rebuild a coherent economic whole from scattered elements, while securing each authorisation and each transfer. The court had to be satisfied that the acquisition proposal was sound, the continuity of the business had to be preserved and the value of the assets concerned had to be maintained. The difficulty lay in coordinating those several dimensions within the tight and competitive framework of sales conducted through the court, where each decision affects economic, legal and local interests at once.

Our involvement

We devised an approach that drew those constraints together into a clear and coherent offer to acquire. Acting for one of the principal French groups in the hotel and restaurant sector, we secured the legal aspects of the sale, anticipated what the court would expect, took account of the features specific to each of the assets and safeguarded the operating authorisations held under concession. The acquisition was carried through under the court-approved sale plan.