About

Number of years practice: 35 Principal practice areas: Corporate and M&A, private equity, finance, restructuring Bar admissions: New York Languages spoken: English and Spanish

As well as handling cross-border M&A and large-scale joint ventures, the ‘practical, intelligent and incredibly effective’ Gabriel Mesa assists clients with financing and restructuring in Latin America and other emerging markets. Venture capital, private equity, oil-and-gas projects and privatisations all fall under his remit. Mesa’s Mexican experience is extensive. He advised Grupo P.I. Mabe on its $425m sale to publicly listed Belgian company Ontex Group; and acted for Latin American private equity fund Linzor Capital Partners on the merger of the retail operations of its portfolio company Moda en Distribución with Devlyn Holdings to create the country’s largest eyewear retailer. He also assisted Grupo Financiero Banorte with its $1.6bn purchase of Afore Bancomer (from BBVA) to create Mexico’s largest pension fund. Smaller-scale corporate activity in Mexico has included advising the management of a paper products company on the acquisition of a controlling stake in the company by a private equity firm. Outside of Mexico, Mesa assisted Colombian financial conglomerate Grupo Sura with its $516m purchase of a 50% stake in Peruvian pension fund AFP Horizonte from BBVA. He has also acted for a European commercial bank on billions of dollars’ worth of acquisitions and disposals of financial services companies in Mexico, Colombia, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina over a five-year period. In the energy space, he advised a Colombian pipeline company on a large minority investment by a US private equity firm, and assisted a Colombian utility with unwinding a project financing and selling a controlling stake in the project to two private equity firms.