About

Number of years practice: 25 Principal practice areas: Finance, corporate, alternative lender and private credit Bar admissions: New York Languages spoken: English and Spanish

Joy Gallup is a partner in the Latin America and corporate practices of Paul Hastings. She has extensive experience in corporate finance transactions and complex, cross-border debt restructurings in Latin America. Based in the firm’s New York office, Gallup regularly represents underwriters and domestic and international issuers in private and public offerings of debt and equity securities. Gallup led the team that has won recognition for its work on deals related to the New International Airport of Mexico City project, which involved an innovative financing plan of bonds and loans and included the largest “green bond” offering in Latin America at the time. In 2013, she represented private equity firm Ventura Capital in its successful takeover of Maxcom Telecomunicaciones, a facilities-based telecommunications provider. The takeover was accomplished through a simultaneous public tender offer for the shares of Maxcom in Mexico and an SEC-registered tender offer in the US and was conditioned on a complete reorganisation of Maxcom’s capital structure, which was accomplished by filing a pre-packaged chapter 11 bankruptcy plan in Delaware to compel Maxcom’s bondholders to accept new high-yield bond terms. The interplay between the Mexican and US corporate and securities rules, the US SEC and Mexican CNBV tender offer rules, and the US bankruptcy rules all being applied by a group of Mexican investors led by a Mexican private equity firm created an innovative approach to M&A that has not previously been tried in any emerging market. In 2015, she represented GE Capital as lender and agent in an approximately $3bn seller financing loan facility for Blackstone’s acquisition of GE’s Mexican commercial mortgage portfolio. This was one of the largest real estate financings ever in Latin America, secured by an extremely large and diverse real estate portfolio that GE was trying to monetise under very tight time constraints; the deal represented the first use of a dual currency seller financing structure in the Mexican market. Gallup is Member of the American Bar Association Committee on Business Law and has written extensively on the topics of Latin America capital markets and debt restructuring.