About

With qualifications in a Germany, France and the UK and a highly successful private practice career at such firms as Ashurst, Simmons & Simmons and Baker McKenzie under his belt (during which he specialised particularly in M&A, private equity, and project financing), Daniel Schmachtenberg was offered the chance to undertake an exciting role in the international projects department of industrial gases and engineering giant Linde Group. Here, he explains how he was given the opportunity to ‘gain additional, hands-on international experience and manage legal work streams for projects with Linde investments close to €1bn within a few years with a closer, more in-depth relationship to business’, and excelled. As a result, he was promoted in 2015 to head of legal for Benelux, France, Spain, Portugal and North Africa, taking on a team of lawyers in the process, and head of the EMEA hub legal onsite, comprising project experts across Europe. Schmachtenberg has a number of career highlights to look back on, and recalls one very large deal as a particularly fond memory: ‘One highlight relates to the successful bidding and signing and completion for Linde’s three digit million investment into the multi-billion project financed petrochemical cluster established by Dow Chemicals and Saudi Aramco in the Middle East. My legal advice to the competitive bidding process started almost immediately after I joined Linde, including several weeks of negotiations abroad’. As well as this, he notes another, similar project in Russia that also had an extremely high value investment behind it. This comprised of ‘a complex joint venture structure for Linde, which required close collaboration with our local in-house team colleagues and special deal management to overcome cultural differences, Russian law particularities and language barriers. Despite my lack of Eastern European experience the deal was not only successfully closed but also long term personal relationships within Linde and to our JV colleagues were established’. Apart from these mega-projects, he and his team are now in charge of many other legal challenges, including customer and supplier negotiations, litigation and arbitration matters, organisational matters, outsourcing, restructurings and many more.