David is a Partner in our Corporate team.
Experienced in domestic and cross-border corporate transactions, he has a focus on acquisitions and disposals, corporate restructuring and group reorganisations, corporate refinancing and other strategic corporate projects. Also experienced in a variety of day-to-day corporate governance and strategies to improve corporate decision-making for established businesses and start-up companies, David provides commercially focused advice to owner-managers, management teams and shareholders.
He has also advised on a number of high-profile private equity transactions in the North West.
Having advised on number of complex and high-value acquisition and disposal transactions, David has valuable experience of working on cross-border transactions having worked on deals in the USA, continental Europe, India, Hong Kong, South America and Australasia.
His experience has covered many sectors and markets. More recently it has included transactions in healthcare, life sciences, technology, sports, media and telecoms, insurance, education, consumer services, logistics, manufacturing and engineering sectors. He also has experience of deals involving public companies and deals subject to the Takeover Code.
Key clients include UK-based companies, often with overseas operations, foreign companies with UK-based commercial interests, start-up business with a North West connection and high-net-worth families/individuals with corporate investments.
An active advisor operating in the Manchester legal market for in excess of 10 years, he has advised on some of the most complex and high-value acquisition and disposal transactions Knights has been involved with. Having collaborated on a wide-range of transactions and supported many shareholders, management teams and businesses, he has a valuable skill set to offer new and existing clients and has an established client base scaling the UK.
In addition to his valuable experience, David is an effective deals advisor and has a keen interest in working on cross-border transactions and managing large and complex strategic projects. He also provides legal advice to entrepreneurs, business owners and founder-shareholders of start-up and SME businesses.
Recent examples of how David has supported his clients include:
- advising the shareholders of a global leading CDMO business on the disposal to a global pharmaceuticals PLC;
- leading on the disposal of Cormis Partnership Ltd and Cormis Partnership LLC, to Huntsworth Healthcare;
- supporting Indian automotive dealer TVS & Sons on a series of worldwide mergers and acquisitions, refinancing projects and corporate restructures;
- facilitating the sale of family-owned Barnsley Football Club to a Hong Kong conglomerate;
- advising Recipharm on its £45m acquisition of Sanofi’s drug-inhalation manufacturing business;
- leading on Baywater Healthcare’s acquisition of Intus Healthcare.