Charles Mayo

Corporate/corporate and commercial.

Charles advises a wide range of leading listed companies, investment banks and brokers. He specialises in public/private partnerships, equity capital markets, and mergers and acquisitions transactions. Charles regularly advises on the listing, disclosure, prospectus and transparency rules and participates in a series of workshops on these rules with the Financial Services Authority and the London Stock Exchange. Charles also specialises in advising on the legal aspects of corporate governance and compliance, including advising on the Bribery Act. He also has particular experience in the life sciences, aerospace and defence and transport sectors. Charles’s recent experience includes: advising the Ministry of Defence on the public/private partnership with Carlyle in relation to QinetiQ, including the £1.3bn IPO of QinetiQ on the Official List, the first UK Government IPO for nearly a decade; advising the selling shareholders of Specifar Pharmaceuticals S.A., a generic drug developer, on the US$562m acquisition of the company by Watson Pharmaceuticals Inc.; advising on the ‘virtual’ acquisitions and AIM IPOs of Center Parcs and of Anker and on the IPOs of Plethora (UK), Endace (NZ) and Asian Citrus (China), Sinclair Pharma on its Main Market listings in London and Paris, Japaninvest on its Tokyo listing and CLSA as sponsor of the Hong Kong listing of RCG, the first Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing of an AIM-traded company; and advising the UK Government on the Energy Technology Institute, a not-for-profit public/private partnership to research lower carbon energy to help tackle climate change. Charles and Nick Benwell (litigation partner) led the team that won the Innovation in Anti-bribery and Corruption award at the Financial Times European Innovative Lawyers Awards 2011. Charles was also behind the firm winning the 2011 Best Regulatory Law Firm of the Year Award at the Thomson Reuters Accelus 7th Annual Compliance Awards. The Legal 500 UK highlighted Charles as a ‘Leading Individual’ in the pharmaceutical and biotechnology sector.