GGI member law firm Spigulis & Kukainis facilitates successful merger of several Baltic companies

JSC Dobeles Dzirnavnieks is Latvia's largest grain processing and food production company. Its main activities are the production of all types of wheat flour, semolina, flour mixtures, pasta, cereal flakes, groats and animal feed.

Spigulis & Kukainis provided transaction structuring services and full legal services during the process of preparing of merger notification and submission to the Latvian Competition Council, which resulted in full approval of this merger; the firm also coordinated these processes in Estonia and Lithuania.

The transaction began in 2014, but transactions of this size require special caution in order not to violate national regulations in any way. Other law firms in Lithuania and Estonia also participated in this transaction, a process that was coordinated by Spigulis & Kukainis.

This transaction was very challenging both from the point of view of commercial law and competition law, especially because JSC Dobeles Dzirnavnieks bought AS Rigas Dzirnavnieks – its closest competitor in Latvia – and thus created a dominant position for the merged entity in several affected markets in Latvia. This transaction was also significant from the perspective of competition law because Latvian Competition Council for the very first time applied standards for the protection of a failing company under competition law according to the European Commission’s Guidelines on the Assessment of Horizontal Mergers (Horizontal Guidelines).