gunnercooke LLP

Banking & Finance

Partner

Paul is a highly experienced finance lawyer with extensive experience in many different areas of finance work. As well as general banking his expertise takes in acquisition finance, commodity finance, Islamic finance, project finance and real estate finance.

He works on both the borrower and lender side and he has extensive experience in advising parties at all levels in the debt stack; senior, mezzanine and junior and related inter-creditor and priority issues.

The debt finance market has become increasingly sophisticated. The emergence of debt funds and challenger banks has brought with it new ways of providing and structuring debt. Many debt fund deals, for example, are now funded through a mix of conventional debt combined with equity or a quasi-equity reward/fee structure. These deals blur the line between simple debt and corporate finance and are often effectively joint ventures. Paul has worked on many transactions of this type.

Deals do sometimes go wrong. Paul has a substantial amount of experience in debt restructuring and also on the sale and purchase of distressed and performing loans and loan portfolios.

He has had a particular focus on real estate finance. As well as working on deals for UK assets, he has worked on many cross border deals in other jurisdictions where English law debt is provided to finance a local asset. These other jurisdictions where he has experience include the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal and Spain.