About

Ed Riley’s career started at Clifford Chance in London in 1997 and as a trainee he enjoyed a six-month client secondment to Airbus in Toulouse, which sparked his interest in the aviation industry. He then qualified into the asset finance team, specialising in aircraft finance, advising airlines, banks and lessors and also did a client secondment to GE Capital’s aircraft leasing business in Shannon. In 2001 he joined Airbus in Toulouse on a permanent basis and worked on a wide variety of aircraft sale, purchase, lease and finance transactions, as well as on the financing of the infrastructure required for manufacturing the A380. Riley moved to Dublin in 2007, to join RBS Aviation Capital where his role involved the negotiation of transaction documentation with airlines, financiers, lessors and export credit agencies. In 2010, Riley was one of the team of executives who founded and launched the Avolon business, which has now grown to having over 550 aircraft and 200 employees. In the words of a nominator, ‘Riley has been general counsel at Avolon for more than nine years now. During this time he has put in place a very impressive legal department in the organisation made up of more than 30 lawyers. He has also overseen Avolon’s expansion from a start-up to an IPO and Avolon’s establishment as a large listed company. Since then he has coordinated numerous large scale transformational transactions including the sale of Avolon to HNA Group, its acquisition of CIT and the more recent minority acquisition by ORIX’. Recent transactional highlights include Orix’s acquisition of a 30% shareholding in Avolon in 2018 and Avolon’s public market debt raising of over US$10bn raised since January 2017, culminating in a US$2.5bn investment grade note offering in April 2019.