Mergers & Acquisitions

Universal Music Group is a music and entertainment company active in recorded music, music publishing, merchandising and audiovisual content. It has been listed on Euronext Amsterdam since 2021. Pershing Square Capital Management, L.P. is a New York-based hedge fund founded and managed by Bill Ackman.

De Brauw advised Coincheck Group N.V. on a strategic minority investment by KDDI Corporation, a listed Japanese telecommunications company. Coincheck Group and KDDI have entered into a Share Subscription and Investor Rights Agreement pursuant to which KDDI will acquire a 14.9% stake in Coincheck Group.

De Brauw advised Inflexion, a leading European mid-market private equity firm, on its acquisition of a 30% minority stake in Marktlink Capital, a leading Benelux investment platform providing private investors with access to private equity, venture capital and private credit funds across Europe and North America.

Political influence over bank M&A in the EU is not new, but it has rarely been this visible. Over the past two years, three of Europe’s most consequential bank transactions have shown that commercial rationale, competition clearance and prudential approval alone may not determine a transaction’s prospects. Political feasibility can be equally decisive. Then Vice-President of the European Central Bank (ECB), Luis de Guindos, was blunt in a May 2026 exit interview: "Political interference eats away at the credibility of the Single Market message".

Data centres have become foundational infrastructure for the global economy. The sector is attracting investment at a scale and pace without modern precedent. Accelerating digitalisation, the computational demands of AI, and the strategic priority that governments now attach to sovereign compute capacity have together transformed data centres into pillars of national industrial strategy. Yet the regulatory and infrastructure frameworks that govern their development have not kept pace with that demand. A defining feature of the sector is a collision between the political and economic imperative to build at speed on the one hand, and the physical and regulatory constraints on the other. Congested electricity grids, lengthening grid connection queues, inflexible planning regimes, tightening environmental obligations, and an increasingly assertive foreign investment-screening apparatus are factors that ultimately determine whether, where, when, and on what terms a project can in fact proceed.

To prevent strategic knowledge and technology from falling into the hands of parties that pose a threat to national security, the scope of the Dutch general investment screening regime will be broadened. This regime − set out in what is known in the Netherlands as the "Vifo Act" − covers investments in vital providers, companies involved in sensitive and highly sensitive technology, and operators of business campuses (see our June 2023 article explaining the regime here).