The focus of the Werksmans Banking & Finance practice is on simple yet unique solutions to the intricate legal issues that confront clients. The team’s transactional and regulatory lawyers have led the way with complex transaction types and financial instruments, that are now being used in South Africa, by facilitating ground-breaking transactions in both primary and secondary markets.

With our solution driven focus, the lawyers in our Banking & Finance department have consistently been ranked as leaders in their respective fields, not only by our clients but also by their local and international peers. This is evident in all of the fields that we work in. In the infrastructure and project finance field, our lawyers have represented lenders and borrowers in some of the largest transactions of this type in Southern Africa. The industry sectors involved include mining and exploration, roads, prisons, water and others. The same can be said of our syndicated and bilateral financing work, where we have advised lenders and borrowers across various industry sectors such as consumer products, retailing, mining and exploration, financial services, telecommunications and others. We have a special focus on medium and large local and international transactions. In the leveraged and acquisition finance field, our experienced transactional lawyers are in high demand and have advised on the vast majority of private equity transactions and other public-to-private transactions in South Africa over the last few years.

In the debt capital markets field, the team advised on the first issue by a South African insurer of callable bonds that qualified as secondary capital for the issuer. In the equity markets, the team advised on the establishment of the first commodity-tracking ETF in South Africa in 2005 and has since facilitated the creation of a number of ETFs currently listed on the JSE Securities Exchange. Team members regularly advise on IPOs and other securities law-related matters. In a number of cases, the transactions concerned have been among the largest of their kind. In the securitisation field, the team’s expertise remains unique. To date, only three synthetic securitisations have been undertaken in South Africa – and our Banking & Finance lawyers were actively involved in all three of them. The team also assisted in the development of the first overnight call loan/bond fund established in South Africa and advised on the establishment of four of the six asset-backed conduits done in South Africa so far (including the first Fitch Vector ZAF compliant conduit). 

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