Profile details
About Richard Hart
Richard specialises in structured products and derivatives transactions, usually with a cross-border focus.
He acts for financial institutions and end-users, as well as investment managers and sovereign entities. He has a wide experience of complex structured equity transactions, in a variety of formats including derivatives and loans. Clients also call on Richard’s extensive knowledge of securities financing (both cash and synthetic) to assist on a wide range of prime brokerage, stock-lending and repo matters. Richard has also been involved with structuring hedging solutions for a wide variety of financings, including securitisations, leveraged buyouts and project financings.
Recent work
- Advising UBS on a range of aspects of its merger with Credit Suisse related to derivatives and a range of other trading agreements.
- Advising HSBC and Barclays as lenders to Global City Theatres on the £470m margin lending transaction which allowed GCT to subscribe for Cineworld's £1.7bn rights issue, and the subsequent Covid-era restructuring of that margin loan.
- Advising both banks and sponsors on a range of other confidential strategic equity transactions, including in margin loan and derivatives formats.
- Advising a major international bank on all aspects of its cash and synthetic prime brokerage business.
- Advising a major international bank on the structuring of all aspects of its agency pledge stock-lending business.
- Advising a FTSE 100 listed company on its employee share option scheme hedging programme, facing a range of bank counterparties.
- Advising a major US bank on the syndication of its margin financing book, using both funded and unfunded structures to achieve regulatory capital efficiencies.
- Advising the Nestlé group on all aspects of its hedging arrangements (including for commodities and pension funds), including the worldwide reorganisation of its hedging book to use a centralised treasury entity, and the impact of EMIR and Dodd-Frank.
- Advising on upwards of 40 deal contingent hedging transactions (both FX and rates) in the years 2017 to 2023, including with respect to public bids.
Qualifications
2017 - present Partner, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer
2011 - 2017 Senior Associate, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer
2006 - 2011 Associate, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer
2004 - 2006 Trainee, Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer
2002 - 2004 BBP Law School, London
1998 - 2001 Cambridge University (Christ's College), BA (History)