Shepherd and Wedderburn banking team enjoys strong year with £93.4bn worth of deals

The past year has seen the firm’s finance lawyers’ work on 144 deals worth £93.4 billion. Among the team’s clients in this area are banks, funds and financial institutions, corporate borrowers and sponsors from across the globe.

Highlights on capital markets and securitisation work included acting on three separate “Towd Point/Granite” securitisations with an aggregate value of £7bn in relation to the “Neptune” portfolio of Northern Rock residential mortgages and unsecured loans purchased by Cerberus from the UK government. Granite 1 was the largest RMBS since 2007 and is the 2017 IFLR European Structured Finance and Securitisation deal of the year.

In addition to a comprehensive set of capital markets and securitisation deals, the past year has seen the firm involved in ground breaking work on certain projects that are having an immense impact on their respective sectors.

On the project finance and infrastructure front, the firm advised the UK Green Investment Bank plc (GIB) in relation to its latest Green Loan to help Stirling Council save £31m over the next 30 years by installing energy saving streetlights. Stirling Council is borrowing £9.87m from GIB and will install light-emitting diodes instead of traditional sodium lightbulbs in 12,000 streetlights over four financial years. The council will also replace 4,000 of the columns, marking a major investment in infrastructure for the county.

The team is especially proud of its work supporting clients who are developing projects that impact positively on local communities, such as advising Nord L/B on the £70m funding of the new East Lothian Community Hospital project. The project involves the construction of a 23,000 square metre hospital in the existing Roodlands Campus site, bringing a high quality, modern hospital which has patients’ needs at its heart to an area that needs it.

Fiona Buchanan, head of banking and finance at Shepherd and Wedderburn, said: “Our top-ranked banking and finance team is delighted to have worked on this diverse portfolio of deals. We are especially heartened to have been able to work with a wide range of organisations — from large multinationals to owner-operated SMEs.”