About

Number of years practice: 11 Law school attended: Yale Law School Languages spoken: English, Portuguese and Spanish Principal practice areas: Capital Markets, Leveraged Finance and Lending, M&A, Private Equity Admissions: New York

Werner Federico Ahlers is a partner in Sullivan & Cromwell’s M&A, corporate and finance, and project development and finance groups. Fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, Ahlers has advised a range of strategic and financial investors on matters across Latin America in sectors spanning energy, natural resources and infrastructure, telecommunications, healthcare and financial services. This wide ranging experience has, says Ahlers, allowed him to ‘acquire an extraordinary diversity of practice in Mexico, across the hemisphere and beyond, enabling me to bring the resources of the firm to bear for clients by working on deal teams able to find state-of the-art deal technologies that help to achieve their objectives.’ Among the significant matters Ahlers has worked on, assisting AT&T’s expansion into Mexico stands as a particular highlight. This expansion resulted in AT&T’s acquisition, in rapid succession, of Iusacell and Nextel, the two companies holding the third and fourth largest subscriber bases in Mexico, for a combined value of over $4bn. The transactions formed an important step in AT&T’s plans to create the first-ever North American Mobile Service area, covering more than 400 million customers in Mexico and the United States in a single network. Ahlers has also been closely involved with Sullivan & Cromwell’s work on a number of United Mexican States’ sovereign offerings, along with several extremely complicated, natural resource and FIBRA-related projects. Ahlers is, in addition, a committee member of the Cyrus R. Vance Center for International Justice, a committee member of the New York City Bar Association’s Council on International Affairs, a team member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a former chair of the Inter-American Affairs Committee of the New York City Bar Association. Are there any sectors you regard as likely growth areas for the Mexican market over the next five years? The potential of Mexico’s energy reform has yet to be fully realized due in part to the currently suppressed state of oil prices. If (and when) this turns around, I expect it will be a significant growth area in Mexico, which will get a boost from both the recent energy reforms and new investment vehicles available for foreign investors such as the FIBRA-E. I also think the real estate market, with the attractiveness of FIBRA vehicles for foreign and local investment, as well as companies in the health care/life sciences, consumer products and education sectors, also have the potential to be significant growth sectors.