About

Number of years practice: 13

Principal practice areas: Bankruptcy and Restructuring, Capital Markets, Leveraged and Acquisition Finance, Mergers, Acquisitions and Joint Ventures, Project Finance, and Infrastructure

Bar admissions: New York

Languages spoken: English, Spanish

Adam Brenneman is known for impressive work on complex multijurisdictional transactions throughout Latin America. He has emerged as a go-to lawyer for securities and lending transactions across sectors and across a broad spectrum of situations, including restructurings, financings, mergers and acquisitions, and public-private partnerships (PPP).

Brenneman’s reputation for identifying and unlocking market opportunities through his debt work has resulted in his handling of some of the most high-profile and high-stakes assignments in Latin America in the past ten years. His impressive work in Mexico includes representing:

• Empresas ICA in the restructuring of over $3.5bn of debt through a Mexican concurso mercantil proceeding;
• Casas GEO in over $1bn of debt through a Mexican concurso proceeding;
• UBS in its role as administrative agent, collateral agent, and lender in a $75m senior secured guaranteed bridge loan facility for Alpha Holding S.A. de C.V. (AlphaCredit);
• The initial purchasers in the Ps.4.0bn global initial public offering of Grupo Traxión, one of Mexico’s leading road transportation and logistics companies; and
• Grupo Aeroportuario del Sureste (ASUR) in its acquisition of a 60% stake in the San Juan Puerto Rico airport.

He is a founding editor of the firm’s Emerging Markets Restructuring Journal, which is the first publication to focus solely on emerging markets restructuring law and practice and was created to gather cutting-edge research while developing practices and analyses of new laws from emerging markets around the globe.

Cleary has maintained a dominant market position, with over $50bn in closed M&A involving Mexican companies and over $175bn in capital markets offerings by Mexican issuers since 2006, including Grupo Bimbo in its strategic outbound acquisitions that transformed them into the world’s largest baking company; and Pemex in several innovative financings, including the largest-ever euro-denominated emerging-market corporate-bond offering. The firm has advised on many of most significant IPOs to come out of Mexico over the past few years, including Vista Oil & Gas, Grupo México Transportes, and IEnova.

The firm has restructured more private sector Latin America debt than any other firm (including the ICA restructuring, which was the largest in the country over the last five years). Additionally, the team has acted on significant cross-border restructuring for Mexican companies including Oro Negro, ODH, Oceanografia, Arendal, Maxcom, Corporación GEO, Comerci, Gruma, Industrias Unidas, IusaCell, and others.

Cleary’s transactional capabilities are boosted by the firm’s exceptional reach in Mexico. Over 100 of the firm’s former lawyers work in top positions in the government, in Mexican companies, and at the country’s leading law firms. The team often works together with its network of alumni to collaborate on both multijurisdictional and local Mexican regulatory issues.