Covington Named Dealmakers of the Year by The American Lawyer

NEW YORK—The American Lawyer has named Covington lawyers Sergio Urías and Laura Torre as “Dealmakers of the Year.” The annual feature highlights “the most impressive and significant matters that deal lawyers worked on in 2019.”

Shareholders of Covington’s client Prisma Medios de Pago, Argentina’s largest payment processing company, were mandated by the antitrust authority to sell control of the company on a tight timeframe. The transaction was hampered by several factors, including a massive devaluation of the peso weeks before the target signing date, effectively shutting down the debt markets. In addition to engineering a creative financing solution that protected sellers and allowed them to meet the antitrust deadline, the Covington team also negotiated multifaceted exit mechanics permitting sellers to meet future regulatory requirements to disinvest completely within three years.

“One of the challenges was to navigate both the typical transactional issues of running a process and dealing with bidders and sellers, but then also the public policy component, which was very present in every decision that was made in structuring and negotiating the deal,” Mr. Urias said. “From the get-go, we spent a lot of time structuring what the transaction was going to look like.”

The Covington team was led by Mr. Urías and Ms. Torre and included Andrew Heather (corporate), Ansgar Simon (tax), Brian Rosenzweig and Sharon Freiman (capital markets and securities), Peter Schwartz, Brent Little, and Christopher Yen (finance), Jennifer Saperstein, Ashley Sprague, and Santiago Zalazar (anticorruption), Nicole Duclos (international arbitration), and Michael Nonaka, Kimberly Strosnider and Jenny Konko (regulatory).

The full Dealmakers profile can be found here.