Charlie is a Partner in the Commercial team, specialising in Competition Law.
With over 17 years' experience, Charlie advises on a wide spectrum of compliance and commercial law matters, including mergers and acquisitions, commercial agreements, trade practices, information exchange and investigations into anti-competitive conduct. As well as competition law, Charlie also has a proven track record in assisting clients with UK National Security Investment Act clearances and foreign direct investment approvals worldwide.
Charlie's clients come from a wide range of sectors, including aviation, financial services, food, pharmaceuticals, renewable energy, retail, wholesaling, and water. Charlie also has experience advising in-house following secondments at Cathay Pacific Airlines (as Global Head of Compliance) and HSBC (as APAC Head of Antitrust).
Charlie's recent work highlights include:
- Advising Wolseley UK Limited, the UK's most complete distributor of construction and industrial materials, in relation to its acquisition of Kooltech Limited, an applied distributor of air conditioning. The parties overlapped in the wholesale of air conditioning equipment in a number of local markets and the transaction created the largest wholesaler on a national basis. The transaction was notified to the Competition and Market Authority and Charlie represented the client throughout the issues meeting and throughout the undertakings process;
- Working with Cranswick Plc on a number of different strategic acquisitions and providing merger control advice, including helping them to notify the CMA in relation to their acquisitions of JSR Genetics Limited, Blakeman's Limited and Froch Food.
- Providing advice to Bentley Motors Limited in relation to the CMA and European Commission's investigations into the recycling of end-of-life vehicles. This included conducting an internal compliance investigation to understand the role played by Bentley and its employees in appointing a provider of ELV services;
- Advising Norcros Plc, owner of Grant Westfield - the leading UK provider of waterproof wall panels, on the merger control implications of its potential purchase of FIBO AS - the second largest waterproof wall panel company. Together, the combined entity would have a market share of around 50%;
- Creating and rolling out competition law compliance policies for numerous businesses and conducting business-wide face-to-face competition law training for their employees;
- Providing advice on numerous metal-neutral joint ventures within both the passenger and cargo aviation industries and obtaining clearance;
- Conducting a competition risk assurance exercise across all business units of a global bank with tailored recommendations and outputs;
- Leading simulated dawn raids at a number of client premises to evaluate their preparedness for potential investigations by competition authorities.
Charlie is ranked as an "Associate to Watch" in Chambers 2025 and also as a "Leading Associate" in Legal500, where he is described as "top notch". Charlie is commended for "understanding the tone we need and applying the law in a way that is understood by our company" and being "very easy to work with, sensible, pragmatic, knowledgeable and a very decent guy", as well as his ability to "put across the technicalities of the legislation without it bamboozling the individuals hearing it."