Project Finance
Project finance continues to be the principal
financing tool for procurement and development of assets across a
wide range of sectors, including oil and gas, power generation
(both conventional and renewable energy), telecommunications,
transport and other infrastructure.
The issues faced by the project finance market
include:
- The credit crisis presented project sponsors and project
financiers with significant challenges. These have included the
tightening of liquidity, pressure on tenors and impacts on pricing
and lenders' structuring requirements.
- Changes in banking regulation introduced in response to the
crisis may affect the ability of banks to make long-term debt
commitments, a traditional feature of project finance
transactions.
- With the exception of the US market, bond issuance continues to
be largely unavailable as a source of project finance debt, mostly
as a result of conditions in the monoline insurance
market.
- Project sponsors continue to seek an effective and liquid means
of accessing alternative institutional funding sources that offer
long-dated loan maturities, such as multilateral agencies,
development finance institutions, export credit agencies and
pension funds.
- As balance sheets are weakened by broader economic conditions,
lenders are generally seeking covenant support requirements that
are, in many cases, more extensive than those found in pre-crisis
deals.
Our global finance practice combines deep and
current legal expertise with both sophisticated marketplace
knowledge and industry expertise. We regularly act for banks,
project sponsors, developers, project companies, multilateral
agencies, export credit agencies, contractors, governments and
other public sector bodies.
We work in all project finance sectors across
the globe, including, oil and gas, power, electricity,
infrastructure, mining, chemicals, petrochemicals, airlines, vessel
companies, shipping, toll roads, telecoms, public private
partnerships and private finance initiatives (PPP/P3/PFI), leisure,
transport and water.
Areas of Focus:
- Infrastructure
- Power
- Utilities
- Oil and gas
- Mining
- Telecoms
- PPP/PFI
- Water
- Renewable energy
- Construction