Data protection and business sales - risks and solutions?

摘要

Buying and selling businesses can create some difficult data protection issues. How can the seller, for example, disclose employee and customer information to prospective buyers for due diligence purposes without breaching the Data Protection Act? To what extent can customer data collected by the seller be used by the buyer for new or different purposes going forward? Similar issues arise in outsourcing transactions where the outsourcing service provider may want access to employee or other data to conduct due diligence. In this article, we examine the key data protection rules and identify pragmatic solutions to manage these risks.