Eelco van der Stok

About Eelco van der Stok

Eelco is a tax partner and heads Freshfields' tax practice in the firm's Amsterdam office.

He is regarded as a leader in the Netherlands tax market and acts regularly for corporates and private equity investors, across many business sectors.

In addition to his advisory work, Eelco leads on a number of investigation and litigation cases, often where tax interacts with other legal or economic issues (including fiscal State aid cases). He is ranked consistently Tier 1 in Chambers.

Eelco speaks German and English as well as his native Dutch.

Recent work

Some highlights of transactional work:

• Advising Universal Music Group N.V. (“UMG”) – a world leader in music-based entertainment – in its separation from Vivendi SE and the listing of its shares on Euronext Amsterdam. As part of UMG’s admission to trading on Euronext Amsterdam, Vivendi made a distribution in kind of close to 60% of the outstanding shares of UMG to Vivendi’s existing shareholders. The deal values UMG at €45bn based on the opening price and is one of the largest IPOs in many years on Euronext Amsterdam. As part of the transaction, Eelco advised also UMG on the USD 4 billion acquisition of 10% of the shares in UMG by Bill Ackman’s SPAC Pershing Square Tontine Holdings from Vivendi (later amended and reassigned to an affiliate of the SPAC).

• Advising The Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. on its acquisition of NN Investment Partners from NN Group N.V. (“NN Group”) for approximately €1.6 billion.

• Advising funds managed by Oaktree Capital Management on the acquisition of the vast real estate assets together constituting the High Tech Campus Eindhoven (HTCE) in the Netherlands, including the acquisition of the entity that provides campus management services to the tenants and users of the HTCE, from different entities indirectly held by investor Marcel Boekhoorn. Not only was this the largest M&A real estate deal in the Dutch market this year, the number of separate properties and varieity of taxes involved (including CIT, RETT, VAT) made it extremely complex.

• Advising EQT Growth, part of the purpose-driven global investment organisation, on two significant growth investments:
  1) the EQT Growth-led €235 million Series E funding round in Mambu, a market-leading SaaS banking platform. The funding is the largest financing round to date for a banking software platform. The funding brings the company's valuation to €4.9 billion post money, making it one of the highest-valued B2B SaaS companies founded in Europe.

  2) their investment in Mollie, one of the largest payment service providers (PSP) in Europe.