Banking & Finance

Ed Aldred’s practice focuses on complex cross-border public and private leveraged acquisition and infrastructure financings, leading combined loan and high-yield bond financings, and senior and junior capital structures.

Ed is a highly regarded leveraged finance lawyer, with more than 19 years’ experience advising on complex leveraged finance deals and developing innovative solutions and strategies for clients on their most strategically significant transactions. He advises private equity and infrastructure funds, corporates, family offices, and sovereign wealth funds on acquisition, infrastructure, and other event-driven finance transactions, as well as minority stake, holdco, and other structured finance transactions. In addition to working on buy-side financings, Ed also supports his clients across all aspects of sell-side finance work (including staple finance, vendor loans, certain funds, change of control, and other sell-side analysis) and with on-going portfolio and liability management work (including taps, A&Es, repricings, refinancings, and recapitalizations).

Ed has led on many “firsts” in the loan market during his career and has acted on some of the largest and most innovative transactions. His knowledge and experience covers the full spectrum of loan products, from syndicated institutional cov-lite incurrence-based TLB facilities through to unitranche and covenanted maintenance loans, including super senior, senior secured, and junior debt instruments. In addition to his familiarity with the European loan market, Ed also has extensive international experience raising U.S. dollar debt in the syndicated U.S. TLB loan market under English law and acting for many international first-time issuers in the syndicated loan market. He has worked closely with the Loan Market Association to develop and deliver their training, including their financial covenant training in particular, and spoken at several Loan Market Association hosted conferences.

Ed joined Cleary Gottlieb as a partner in 2023. Prior to joining the firm, he was the co-head of another major international firm’s financial sponsor leveraged finance practice.

England and Wales