Skadden has had a fairly solid year overall, but on the debt side the market reports that the team has fallen off the radar somewhat, a large factor in its move to tier three this year. "Skadden has not done hardly any debt work over the past 12 months," comments one partner and another adds: "I don't see Skadden all that much on the debt side anymore....
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Skadden has had a fairly solid year overall, but on the debt side the market reports that the team has fallen off the radar somewhat, a large factor in its move to tier three this year. "Skadden has not done hardly any debt work over the past 12 months," comments one partner and another adds: "I don't see Skadden all that much on the debt side anymore." "Skadden is not strong on debt, we haven't seen them," concurs another practitioner in the market.
Despite this, client feedback remains uniformly positive: "The team there is quite good, in a lot of ways," says one while a fellow client speaks to the relationship they had with the team in Moscow: "We have been working with them for several years so we really do work as a team."
On the equity side the team was involved in a clutch of IPOs, a relatively rare occurrence in the market. On one a team featuring leading lawyers Dmitri Kovalenko and Pranav Trivedi advised the O'Key Group, a food retailer, on its $420 million IPO of global depository receipts which had been listed on the LSE.
Another similar, though slightly smaller deal once more involved Kovalenko, as he advised Ros Agro, a food and agriculture concern, on the $330 million IPO of global depository receipts, that again had been formerly listed on the LSE.
Although not quite as visible as previous years the debt team was active and did act on one significant, standout mandate. Leading lawyer Alexey Kiyaskko was joined by Trivedi in advising Barclays, BNP Paribas, Citigroup Global Markets and RBS in their capacity as lead managers in a dual tranche offering of loan participation notes by Russian company Vimpel Communications. The first was a $500 million offering of 6.493 % notes due 2016 with a secondary offering of 7.748% notes due 2021. This transaction completed fully in February 2011 for an overall value of $1.5 billion.
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US giant Skadden has a global reputation in corporate work and the firm can boast a respected team in the Russian capital too."Skadden is probably right in tier two, and I have worked with Linda Davies, she's definitely worthy of special mention," remarks one partner, while another practitioner comments on the team's efficiency: "Skadden, while having a small team on the ground, have a high per capita rate of good work....
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US giant Skadden has a global reputation in corporate work and the firm can boast a respected team in the Russian capital too.
"Skadden is probably right in tier two, and I have worked with Linda Davies, she's definitely worthy of special mention," remarks one partner, while another practitioner comments on the team's efficiency: "Skadden, while having a small team on the ground, have a high per capita rate of good work. They have good people."
Another competitor throws some light on how preparatory work is handled and, by extension, how on-the-ball Skadden is technically: "Skadden is good. Put it this way, if Skadden was opposite me I would spend more time preparing than if it were some of the other firms."
A standout deal for the firm came at the end of 2010, when a team containing leading lawyer Pranav Trivedi advised Altimo Holdings and Investments in connection with its 45% stake in Vimpel Communications in line with VimpelCom's merger with the emerging markets and Italian telecommunications assets of Weather Investments, a private investment instrument that is in turn majority-owned by Egyptian entrepreneur Naguib Sawiris. A long running deal, it completed fully in October 2010 for a sizeable $21.5 billion.
The two leading lawyers also teamed up to advise the state-controlled Russian holding company OAO Svyazninvest, a majority shareholder in numerous regional telecoms companies (RTOCs), in its merger with OAO Rostelecom, a NYSE-listed Russian company that was the single-largest provider of fixed-line telephony services in the country. This merger also entailed the merging of a number RTOCs all coming under the Rostelecom umbrella. A large and difficult deal, work completed on it in April 2011.
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