LAWFUEL – The Law News Network – Linklaters has advised HSH Nordbank AG on the establishment of its EUR 15 billion Debt Issuance Programme. This programme consolidates and enhances HSH Nordbank AG’s previous debt issuance programme and numerous additional securities sales prospectuses for derivative securities, and is structured to comply with the Prospectus Directive.
The programme permits HSH Nordbank AG to issue a variety of securities: MTNs, equity linked notes, index linked notes, and other types of debt and derivative securities linked to numerous other underlying assets. Furthermore, the programme permits HSH Nordbank AG to issue this whole range of securities under German or English law and German or English language into the institutional and retail markets.
The fact that the programme is so highly structured, permitting such a wide range of securities to be issued and giving full flexibility to choose the law and the language governing the securities, and that it was approved by the German regulator (the Bundesanstalt für Finanzdienstleistungsaufsicht, ‘BaFin’) on 4 July, just after the Prospectus Directive came into force in Germany, made the project unique.
Linklaters teams from Frankfurt, London and Luxembourg (including US-qualified lawyers) worked together on the transaction.
Berthold Kusserow, Linklaters partner in Frankfurt, commented:
“It was HSH Nordbank’s aim to continue its refinancing activities in the capital markets without any interruption after the implementation of the Prospectus Directive. We are proud that shortly after we helped to establish HSH Nordbank’s US$15 billion US MTN Programme, we have now created the platform for HSH Nordbank’s European refinancing activities, which became fully operational on 4 July with BaFin’s approval. We greatly enjoyed working alongside HSH Nordbank’s in-house team on this challenging project.”
The Linklaters team, led by partners Berthold Kusserow (Frankfurt) and Jasper Evans (London), included: Ray Fisher, Oliver Dreher, Sabine Rech, Florian Wirth, Dirk Eisel, Yesim Köse, Philippe Kamarowsky, Thilo Danz (all Frankfurt), Duleep Sahni, Sara-Jayne McNally (both London), and Nicki Kayser (Luxembourg).
