The Asian Legal Business Awards - Toru Ishiguro from Mori Hamada & Matsumoto

By Louise Calvert

J@pan Inc attended this impressive ceremony at the Ritz-Carlton in Tokyo at the start of the summer. Asian Legal Business (ALB) is a well respected legal business magazine based out of Hong Kong and this was the third time that they have held an award ceremony in Japan. Editor, Ben Abbott, told us that the event is a good opportunity to recognize some of the work that goes into making the billion-dollar deals that we see in the headlines. For example, the Vodafone- SoftBank deal, valued at US$10.86 billion, was the world’s largest leveraged buyout (LBO) for 17 years, since the RJR Nabisco transaction. Stephen Mulrenan, ALB executive editor, told us that there were two key elements to the deal: it had to be done incredibly quickly, and it had to be structured as a tender offer. “Usually an LBO of this size would take months to put together, but counsel on this deal only had a few weeks.”

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