About

Established in 2015, the KRÜGER Group legal team has made an undoubtedly positive impact on the company’s fortunes since then, establishing itself successfully within the business. General counsel and head of M&A Martin Fröhlich goes into just some of what this entailed: ‘The process of establishing a new legal and tax department from scratch for the entire, international and decentralised Group is an ongoing challenge and task that still continues. Our daily business covers a broad range of activities: highly complex M&A transactions such as the acquisition of the brands MaxiMuscle and MaxiNutrition from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in the UK, handling the day-to-day business of an internationally-active and continuously-growing multi-business group of companies, and providing, quick, business-savvy decisions and delivering hands-on advice to problems arising spontaneously in a family-owned business’. Now firmly part of the corporate makeup of the company, the legal team has consistently contributed excellent results to strategically important projects. In terms of deals, Fröhlich mentions that ‘the most important and most time consuming deal was the acquisition from GSK the business with the brands MaxiMuscle and MaxiNutrition’. The acquisition of these popular and well-established UK businesses was ‘a key element of the establishment of a new business division with Healthy Foods for the European market, a rapidly growing billion Euro sector’. Alongside this, he mentions that ‘the KRÜGER Group legal department negotiated long-term co-manufacturing agreements of strategic importance for the Group in order to utilise the KRÜGER Group’s production capacity with strong international brand players’. Alongside Fröhlich, Kai Piepenstock is mentioned as having made a particularly important contribution to the team’s efforts, given his ‘outstanding expertise in tax and financial matters’.