07 December 2004
Key Points:
A truly national team has successfully completed one of the most complex transactions undertaken by the firm in recent years. The transaction, which involved the sale of the Dampier to Bunbury Natural Gas Pipeline for approximately $1.9 billion, is the largest receivership sale by asset value in Australia to date.
Clayton Utz acted for the sellers of the pipeline (the receivers) and for the syndicate of 28 banks which appointed the receivers in April this year. The sale process began more than a year ago and was completed in late October.
The gas pipeline is Western Australia's single largest piece of infrastructure and is an integral part of keeping the lights on in Perth and other major regional centres. This transaction involved the sale by the receivers of the entities which own the pipeline and certain related assets (referred to as "Epic West" group). The buyer of the Epic West group was a Macquarie Bank-led consortium comprising DUET, Alinta and Alcoa.
“Our team, primarily based in Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, has completed an outstanding job,” said Chief Executive Partner David Fagan. “This was not an easy sale process and it required significant deal-structuring and negotiation. It involved an asset located in Western Australia, on-shore and off-shore banking syndicate clients, bidders located in Canada, United States, Western Australia, South Australia and New South Wales, and an incoming security trustee located in Victoria.”
The team was led by two partners in our Banking and Financial Services department, Quentin Solomon and Janet Firkin, and Simon Truskett from our Corporate Department. Commenting on the complexity of the deal, Quentin noted that “completion of the sale alone involved execution of more than 90 documents in time-critical order across several jurisdictions, and completion itself could only occur after several quite difficult conditions precedent were achieved.”
We congratulate all those involved in this important deal.
