Hello everyone. Welcome to the PWC Taxbyte podcast series. My name is Peter Drey, Global Tax

Director in Brussels, and I welcome you to the PWC Textbyte podcast series. In this edition,

we will talk about the impact, the ins and outs of COVID recovery.

I hope that many of you, just like me, enjoy going back a bit to the office, trying to go back to normal.

And I think we will need to talk about how businesses get back to normal.

And for that, I have three experts here in my virtual recording studio.

I welcome, first of all, Nancy De Bele.

Nancy De Bele is a partner leading the MNA team here in Belgium, in PwC, and also Florian, Jacob

Feuerborn and Jürgen Kusz, both directors in the MNA team. With these three experts, I think

we have the right people in house to talk a bit about COVID recovery and the

impact on Belgian businesses. And yeah, Nancy, welcome to the podcast. And I think I want to start

with you, my first question. How would you assess the current impact of COVID in Belgium and the

M&A market? Yeah, I think it's fair to say that this COVID pandemic, the current impact of COVID in Belgium and the MNA market.

Yeah, I think it's fair to say that this COVID pandemic and the related crisis have never negatively impacted the overall economy.

I think we have never seen such a crisis, which was a combination of a health crisis

and a financial crisis.

The impact depends a lot on the sector.

Some businesses were not impacted at all or are even doing better than before COVID.

Others of course, like in the travel sectors are struggling and are still struggling today.

In relation to the MNA market, which temporarily collapsed at the beginning of the crisis,

with a lot of deals being on hold or aborted due to the insecurity at that moment in time,

for now our feeling is that the MNA market, the past, due to the insecurity at that moment in time.

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