Partner
Ed Nalbantian has more than 25 years of experience representing lenders, borrowers, and counterparties in a broad range of cross-border structured and leveraged finance transactions including OTC derivatives and related debt capital markets financings.
He served as co-leader of Jones Day's Banking & Finance Practice from 2009 to 2015. He practiced in the Firm's Paris Office from 1998 to 2004 and continues to represent clients involved in the Paris market. He frequently writes and lectures on structured finance topics. Jones Day is the French Counsel of ISDA, whose France and Ireland Master Agreements Contracts were launched in 2018.
Following the financial crisis, his experience extended to the analysis and dispute resolution of credit-linked structured finance primarily from the firm's role as Special Derivatives Counsel to the Estate of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. He was also a lead partner on Jones Day's multijurisdictional team representing a major U.S. bank in evaluating its risk and documentation exposure in the derivatives, stock lending, and repo markets and, subsequently, in the context of the bank's credit rating downgrade.
More recently, he has been involved in several major strategic portfolio acquisitions of derivatives assets on behalf of major bank clients including as the lead London partner for the Jones Day team, covering six jurisdictions, in representing BNP Paribas on its acquisition of the GBP1.6 billion equity derivatives business of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
In the area of leveraged finance, he has particular experience in infrastructure finance covering a range of project assets. Among notable transactions, he led Jones Day's representation of the senior banks in a €3.5 billion financing of the privatisation of SANEF, the French toll road company.
