Cinven and Warburg Pincus completed the sale of their remaining stakes in Dutch cable company Ziggo in a public offering Friday that reaped a combined total of $1.1 billion for the two private equity firms.
Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer is advising Cinven and Warburg Pincus, according to a source close to the transaction.
In total, Cinven and Warburg Pincus sold off a 17 percent stake in Ziggo, which had seen its stock price increase nearly 50 percent since launching an initial public offering that raised roughly $1.1 billion last year, according to Bloomberg. The private equity pairs priced their Friday offering at $33.54 per share, a 7.5 percent off Ziggo’s Thursday closing price.
Bloomberg adds that Cinven and Warburg Pincuswhich each owned 27 percent of Ziggo following last year’s IPOhave made a combined total of $4.4 billion by gradually unloading their shares in Ziggo in the wake of the company’s successful IPO.
Last month, Barclays sold a 12.7 percent stake in Ziggo to billionaire John Malone’s international cable giant Liberty Global, which in February made a push to expand its European footprint by agreeing to pay $23 billion for Virgin Media. Barclays made $807 million on its sale to Liberty Global after failing to generate enough interest in the Ziggo stake through an attempted public offering, according to a separate Bloomberg report.
Freshfields previously advised both Cinven and Warburg Pincus, along with other investors and Ziggo itself, in connection with the cable company’s 2012 IPO. In December, Cinven turned to Freshfields when it teamed with BCV Investments on the $4.3 billion sale of Italian aerospace company Avio’s aviation business to General Electric.
A Freshfields spokesman did not respond to The Am Law Daily‘s request for information on the firm’s deal team.
