Posted on: 2 May 2023
Watson Farley & Williams (WFW) has promoted eleven lawyers to the firm’s partnership for 2023, bringing the total number of partners to 195. The newly appointed partners most relevant for the maritime sector are:
Laura Cadenas – Assets & Structured Finance, Madrid
Laura has over 16 years’ experience advising on transport-related financing transactions, especially in the aviation and maritime sectors. She has extensive expertise in aircraft financing for helicopters, commercial aircraft and business jets, as well as tax lease transactions for ships, shipbuilding contracts and ECA-backed financings and other asset finance transactions for rail and rolling stock. Laura also has a broad knowledge of M&A and corporate and commercial law.
Shusuke Fukunaga – Assets & Structured Finance, Tokyo
Shusuke has extensive experience in a wide range of both domestic and cross-border banking and finance transactions, focussing on aviation and maritime asset finance. He regularly advises banks, trading houses, corporate investors, airlines, leasing companies, ECAs and other financial institutions. He is a licensed Japanese lawyer (bengoshi) and is also admitted as a solicitor in England & Wales.
Ricky Kim – Assets & Structured Finance, Seoul
With over a decade of experience on all aspects of ship financing, Ricky primarily advises banks, ECAs, private equity investors, funds and shipping companies including owners, managers and charterers. He specialises in banking and finance matters including secured lending, syndicated and bilateral lending, corporate finance and ECA-backed finance, as well as restructuring, works-outs, rehabilitation and loan portfolio transfers. He is qualified in both Singapore and England & Wales.
Marinos Papadopoulos – Assets & Structured Finance, London
Marinos specialises in non-contentious shipping and shipping finance, acting mainly on behalf of private equity funds and ship-owning groups. His expertise includes working on shipbuilding contracts, supervision agreements, charterparties, ship management agreements, sale and purchase transactions as well as loan documentation, finance sale and leasebacks, IPOs and portfolio transfers.
Emily Widdrington – Assets & Structured Finance, London
Emily specialises in shipping finance with over 12 years’ experience advising and acting for banks and ship owners on loan and security documentation. Her experience ranges from advising on high-value ECA-backed financing to loan agreements involving sustainability-linked margin adjustments.
Managing Partner Lindsey Keeble added: “Our new partners span our core sectors of energy, infrastructure and transport across multiple services as well as being based throughout our international network in Europe, Asia and the Americas, including in our newly opened Seoul and Tokyo offices. I am delighted to welcome them to the WFW partnership”.
