Arrowpoint Advisory launches Competition and Markets Authority advisory service

Today, Arrowpoint Advisory, the dedicated mid-market team of Rothschild & Co in the UK, launches a new Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) Advisory service line. The CMA Advisory will provide support to both acquirers and founders in areas such as state aid, foreign direct investment, antitrust, and market investigations. Arrowpoint Advisory’s new CMA Advisory service will include serving as a monitoring and divestiture trustee.

The team will be based in London and led by Graham Carberry, Managing Director, and supported by Tom Smith, Director and Harry O’Connor, Analyst.

Graham Carberry, Managing Director at Arrowpoint Advisory, said: “We have seen the CMA become more active and taking on a greater role since Brexit, and with national supply chain issues raised by COVID-19 and upcoming legislation around foreign direct investment, this trend will only continue. This new service offering will provide an extra layer of support to our clients’ increasingly more complicated deals.”

There are three major factors that have prompted the creation of Arrowpoint Advisory’s CMA Advisory service line:

• The CMA has become more active in its review of proposed and actual transactions where both national and international corporates plan to or have acquired assets in the UK.
• From January 2021 the CMA is set to become the primary state aid authority for the UK as well as taking over responsibility for all competition cases impacting the UK previously handled by the EC; and
• The forthcoming National Security & Investment Bill will materially increase the power of the CMA, SoS and the government more broadly to impact M&A.

These factors have led to more deals being referred to the CMA and require specialist support to remediate these competition related issues. The Arrowpoint Advisory team alongside their colleagues across the Rothschild & Co brand, bring decades of experience working with the CMA, creating a strong and specialised offering to clients.

Carberry concludes: “We’re excited to be putting our extensive sector knowledge and connections to the CMA into a formal service offering that will add value to our current and future clients.”

Contact the team