Wall Street bankers, lawyers losing out on hundreds of millions after Paramount’s scrapped Skydance merger: sources

Wall Street bankers and white-shoe law firms are losing out on hundreds of millions of dollars in fees after Shari Redstone this week made a last-minute decision to scrap plans to merge Paramount with Skydance Media, sources close to the talks said.

Redstone, the 70-year-old media heiress, pulled the plug Tuesday on a deal to sell Paramount Global parent National Amusements to Skydance — even as a special committee of the media giant’s board was expected to meet to vote on a Paramount merger proposal.

Suitors in mergers typically pay greatly reduced fees if they can’t complete their deals. The Paramount-Skydance deal had an unusually large number of bankers and attorneys working on what they thought would be a landmark agreement.

“We grinded for months and months on this deal,” a banker who worked on the deal told The Post. “I feel so badly for the Paramount employees and shareholders. They really had an excellent deal and Paramount would have gotten a second chance to grow.”

Paramount shares have tanked more than 8% since news broke that the merger was called off, erasing more than $1 billion in market capitalization.

Meanwhile, law firm Latham & Watkins, whose mergers advisory practice is led by global chair Justin Hamill, had as many as one hundred attorneys advising Skydance on the complicated merger, which included Skydance both buying Redstone’s holding company National Amusements and merging with Paramount, sources said.