About

A wholly state-owned enterprise, Caixa Geral de Depósitos (CGD) is one of the largest banks in Portugal, with its multinational services servicing total assets of around €93bn. CGD’s legal team has seen increased activity lately on the back of a challenging time for the bank last year, which has seen it look to offload certain non-core international business units. As part of this, they are looking to offload businesses in Africa and Spain, which will reduce foreign assets to a large extent. Alongside this, the Portuguese Ministry of Finance announced last year that a €5bn recapitalisation plan for the company had been agreed with EU regulators, a move which required extensive input from the company’s legal team in terms of outlining and completing due diligence on this complex matter, as well as lobbying and putting across the case to regulators. This recapitalisation plan worked as intended, and in March 2017 the company sold €500m of debt to investors via an Additional Tier 1 sale. The legal team is very well integrated with the company, a state of affairs that has paid dividends with this and other successful projects that show the legal team taking concrete steps to improve the state of the overall business. It is also home to a variety of legal talent, including general counsel José Lourenço Soares and Joao Mendes Rodrigues, a legal counsel with over three years of experience at CGD and a varied workload across the full range of their financial services.