Supporting a private equity owned business with redundancy negotiations for senior employees

Our client’s business was acquired by a private equity firm. Following the acquisition, the investors decided to implement a redundancy programme which included three members of the senior management team. We drafted and negotiated the complex exit agreements for these three senior employees.

The negotiations were complicated by corporate issues. Two of the senior employees had a shareholding in the business following the acquisition and they held corporate loan notes (where an investor lends money to a company).

One of the main disagreements that we needed to resolve was about the restrictive covenants (the things the employees could not do) after employment ended. These restrictions were set out in their employment contracts but also share purchase and investment agreements and the employees were seeking a watering down of those restrictions as part of the exit agreements.

We needed to handle these issues carefully, working with our client’s existing external corporate lawyers. The deals also had to be done rapidly so that they would not cause too much delay in the completion of the wider restructuring exercise. We successfully achieved this outcome.