(Bloomberg) —
Mishcon de Reya LLP, the U.K. law firm looking to be the largest listed law firm, has delayed its planned initial public offering for a second time, according to people familiar with the matter.
The London law firm, initially targeting a listing in January with a valuation of around 750 million pounds ($1 billion), is now considering selling shares in the second quarter at the earliest, the people said, asking not to be identified because the matter is private. It comes as a global stocks rout and surging volatility complicate companies’ path to market.
Mishcon’s IPO would make it the country’s largest listed law firm but it’s recently faced a raft of negative publicity after being hit with a record fine from its regulator over failings with anti-money laundering controls.
Still, it’s not the first IPO hopeful to be put off by volatile markets. File-sharing platform WeTransfer, set to be Europe’s first large listing of the year, withdrew its IPO Thursday after a selloff in technology stocks hit investor appetite. In New York, the market turmoil has forced at least nine firms to put off IPOs, including cloud-based human resources platform Justworks Inc. and Four Springs Capital Trust.
Worries about inflation, the prospect of rapid interest rate hikes and the threat of war between Ukraine and Russia have set global equities on course for their worst month since the pandemic started, weighing on investor appetite for new stocks.
With an IPO, Mishcon would be the largest of a small number of publicly traded law firms including Manchester-based DWF Group Plc, which has a market capitalization of around 375 million pounds.
A spokesperson for Mishcon declined to comment.
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