White & Case LLP - Lawyers - Andrew O'Keeffe

Practice Experience

Andrew O'Keeffe is a Counsel in the Firm's Banking & Capital Markets group and joined the London office of White & Case in 2005.

He has a wide range of experience of syndicated lending especially trade and commodity related deals, project finance, Islamic finance, derivatives and restructuring.

He joined the firm from the London office of a leading niche UK commercial law firm where he was a partner in the bank finance team. Prior to that, Andrew was a senior lawyer at a leading international law firm for six years. He has worked in Singapore, Saudi Arabia and Germany, the latter included time spent on secondment at Commerzbank.

Andrew was a member of Global Trade Review's recent Legal Panel on Commodity and Trade Finance and regularly speaks at conferences on Banking and Trade Finance. Andrew also recently published an article in the ‘International Financial Law Review' entitled "The Effect of Debt Moratoria on Letters of Credit".

Representative transactions include:

Acting for a major investment bank on the financing of the buy-out of the stakes of partners in an iron ore project;
Acting for ABN AMRO as arranger, agent, offshore security agent and lender in respect of a pre-export credit facility agreement provided to JSC "Kazzinc" which won a Best Deals 2008 award from Global Trade Review;
Acting for ABN AMRO on various commodity financing transactions in the CIS;
Acting for numerous banks on syndicated and bilateral loans to financial institutions based in Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Azerbaijan, including a number of pre-export financing transactions;
Acting for Commerzbank AG, Deutsche Bank AG, Dresdner Bank AG, Morgan Stanley International Limited and The Royal Bank of Scotland plc as mandated lead arrangers in connection with the £8.2 billion plus €2 billion financing for the all-cash takeover of FTSE 100 company, BOC Group plc, by the German-based industrial giant Linde AG. This deal created the world's largest industrial gas group. It is the largest overseas acquisition by a German company in four years and one of the largest of the many recent takeovers of UK businesses by non-UK firms; and
Acting for the lenders on refinancing a US$120 million secured loan to a Panamanian company which owned a large stake in a mining project which was in default.

Bars and Courts
England and Wales, 1990

Education
Law Society Finals, Chancery Lane, 1988
LLB, London School of Economics, Hons , 1987

Languages
English
French
Spanish

Citizenship
British