James Fisher

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Blog - reasonableRead time: 4 minutes

The provision of indemnities, particularly those provided to corporate trustees and agents, is an important feature of an effectively functioning structured finance market.  It enables the parties involved to allocate the risks of unforeseen expenditure to those parties with the ultimate economic interest in the transaction and allows trustees and agents to keep their fees at a reasonable level.

Whilst the need for indemnities is generally accepted, the terms on which they are provided can be an area of robust negotiation.
Continue Reading Indemnities – beware the consequences of “reasonableness”

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This week saw the High Court clash between the swap provider, UBS, and the recently appointed replacement note trustee (Glas Trust Corporation) on the embattled Fairhold Securitisation.  The dispute at hand centres on whether or not the ad hoc noteholders group’s fees and expenses (comprising the fees of its financial adviser and lawyers) can be recovered from the waterfall, effectively subordinating payments to the swap providers and noteholders.  The financial adviser’s fees were reported to be in excess of £3.75m.
Continue Reading Fairhold Securitisation – can noteholders claim advisers’ fees through the trustee?

S Caldwell blog - 12.08.15Eight years on from the credit crisis, the drive to rehabilitate securitisation continues.

The most recent body to speak up for the increasingly regulated structures is the European Banking Authority, which last month published an Opinion and an accompanying Report on the establishment of a European framework for qualifying securitisations for the purposes of determining…

clocksI bring good news from the Bank of England. Whether you have been up all night trying to close a £1 billion securities transaction for your client, or you are buying a house and there’s a last minute snag, the deadline for settling securities transactions and making high-value cash transfers is due to be extended…

EMIR’s trade reporting obligations come into effect on 12 February and counterparties to derivative transactions are currently scrambling to ensure they have all the appropriate systems in place to ensure compliance. For large financial institutions, this has already involved many months of hard work and, even still, many are not optimistic about meeting next month’s deadline. At the other end of the spectrum, the administrative burden on one-off or low volume commercial counterparties should be relatively light, and ensuring that the reporting obligations are covered not therefore too taxing.

What then of SPVs – which are neither operational goliaths like their derivative counterparties nor autonomous commercial entities capable of assessing the implications on cost, resources and time of each option open to them?
Continue Reading You Don’t Need EMIRacle – Trade Reporting for SPVs Made Easy

I suspect I may have been alone amongst viewers of the recent Singapore Grand Prix in that, rather than marvelling at the brilliance of Sebastian Vettel’s driving skills, my thoughts instead were on the world’s largest bankruptcy – Lehman Brothers. For those who have not been living and breathing the consequences of the financial sector’s greatest ever failure, the link between the cars and glamour of F1 and an insolvent investment bank may not be immediately obvious. However if you were to know that Lehman Brothers is still the second largest shareholder in the sport, with a 15.3 per cent stake in Formula One’s holding company, then the connection becomes clearer. Given the fourth anniversary of the bank’s demise was a few days ago, it is also a good time to think about how far we’ve come since the dark days of Autumn 2008, a time when many thought the world as we knew it was coming to an end. So, four years on, what have we learnt?
Continue Reading Lehman Car Crash