About

General counsel of the Latin American operations of Macquarie Infrastructure and Real Assets (MIRA), the Macquarie Group’s alternative asset management business, David Handelsmann is ‘a dealmaker in every sense of the term’. Australian by birth and a self-taught Spanish-speaker, commentators note that ‘one of his most impressive traits’ is his ‘rare talent for absorbing legal and industry knowledge and putting it into practice’. Insiders also applaud an ‘impressive combination of legal judgment and business acumen’ that has allowed him to structure transactions across myriad practice areas and industry sectors, and to ‘spearhead ground-breaking deals which require construction from inception to completion without past precedents’. This was demonstrated most recently (2012-3) with his establishment of Macquarie’s Mexican real estate investment trust, an ‘extraordinarily complex project’ involving the setting up of the fund itself, the negotiation and acquisition of two portfolios of real estate assets (totalling 244 industrial real estate properties in 21 cities across 15 Mexican states), three portfolio-level real estate debt financings, one fund-level debt facility, and the subsequent Mexican IPO (with a global private placement pursuant to Rule 144A/Reg. S), which raised approximately $1bn of equity and $1bn of debt. This multifaceted project required him to consider the legal aspects of four transaction types: fund formation, acquisitions, loan financings and equity capital markets, as well as the real estate sector, while remaining attentive to both local (Mexican) regulations and Macquarie’s global practices. He is ‘without doubt, a standout figure’.