São Paulo-based law firm Stocche Forbes Advogados has made an extraordinary push in energy and infrastructure sectors over the 12 years it’s been operating.
Guilherme Forbes, a partner at the firm, explains it thus: “The infrastructure team was born as one of the most established practices in our office, not the least because of the DNA of the founding team. We do not want to work on the retail side of the market, but to focus on big, complex projects where we can add value to the deals.”
Over the past 12 months, Stocche Forbes certainly had ample opportunity to put this philosophy to work. The firm, which wins the award for Infrastructure Law Firm of the Year: Brazil, advised on deals including the R$25.5 billion long-term financing of the Aguas do Rio concessions by Aegea, a mammoth deal that involved a variety of elements including BNDES loans, letters of credit by commercial banks, capital market issuances and multilateral institutions.
It also worked on the sophisticated 22-year, $800 million loan for the Babilonia Centro wind project backed by the national development bank, and the $219 million green debentures issued by Scala to fund the construction of new hyperscale data centers.
Forbes, who has a 25-year career in infrastructure law, expects the sector to continue to provide opportunities for the firm.
“There is a stock of concessions from private sponsors in areas of recent development such as water and sanitation, but also in others more established segments like energy, oil and gas, roads and so on,” he says. “Projects will need to raise financing, and they will demand high-level advisory services.”
Since 2012, when Stocche Forbes was created, the market has gone through dramatic changes, with the withdrawal of the traditional infrastructure sponsors following the long-running Lava Jato corruption scandal which first exploded in 2014, the arrival of new players and the implementation of a new, more market-friendly role by the national development bank BNDES, until recently the country’s principal infrastructure financier.
Fred Moura
Frederico Moura, a partner in Rio de Janeiro who specializes in project finance, says that such changes have helped deals become more sophisticated; this, in turn, has encouraged creativity across the 230-person law firm, not only to win business but also, ultimately, to give comfort to clients.
“Before Lava Jato, construction giants would employ corporate financing, and there was very little money from investment funds,” he says. “As the latter became more common, we have had to create new structures that transmit more confidence to lenders.”