German Law M&A Confidentiality Agreement, German Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA)

A buyer will typically not want to buy "a pig in a poke" - and not only in the area of a company purchase (mergers & acquisitions - M&A in Germany) - and will therefore as a rule request a great deal of information about the object of purchase from the seller. Particularly if the prospective buyer is a competitor who may not be interested in an acquisition at all, but is primarily interested in information about your company as its competitor, a seller will, however, only want to, indeed be able to, hand over information if it is ensured by concluding a non-disclosure agreement (also known as a NDA for short) that access to the company, its employees and numerous internal information will only be used for the purposes of the company purchase. This applies all the more in the case of a company sale in the context of a bidding process, in which the circle of those who receive sensitive company information is often no longer manageable and can only be controlled to a limited extent. This is because, in addition to the prospective buyer itself, this information reaches various employees in the buyer's company, its legal and tax advisors, the M&A advisor(s) or investment banker(s) and any employees of the financing bank(s).