Toby Grimstone > Linklaters LLP > London, England > Lawyer Profile

Drawing upon an excellent overarching perspective of market trends and expertise across the credit spectrum, Linklaters LLP provides ‘technically excellent, powerfully commercial and extremely responsive’ advice to lenders and borrowers, including on general corporate lending facilities and corporate M&A financings. Oliver Edwards and Toby Grimstone are both popular figures among banks and borrowers as a result of their versatility, which includes considerable structured finance expertise – a skill set that Grimstone uses to particularly good effect on behalf clients in the commodities/mining sector. Ian Callaghan regularly acts for creditors and debtors on large-scale syndicated loan transactions, often involving bespoke structures, for both general working capital purposes, in addition to event-driven M&A. The team also includes Caroline Courtney, who is well-versed across a range of products, including as it relates to syndicated lending and asset finance.

Linklaters LLP‘s mining and minerals practice is praised as a ‘deeply experienced team with broad experience across key jurisdictions’ and acts on critical mandates encompassing corporate M&A, financing, regulatory and compliance issues, alongside leveraging the firm’s wider specialist expertise in antitrust, regulatory, tax, IP and environmental law to provide a full-service mining offering. Advising on clients’ ESG strategies remains a core focus for the group, including decarbonisation-related M&A, sustainability-linked financings and strategic investments in ‘green metals’ required for the energy transition. Toby Grimstone co-heads the department alongside James Inglis  and Robert Cleaver. Corporate partner and fellow co-head Aisling Zarraga specialises in public and private M&A, joint ventures and equity issues. Ian Hunter advises mining companies on major M&A transactions and equity offerings, whilst Andrew Jones has over 20 years of experience of developments, acquisitions and financings of mining-sector projects in Africa.

Linklaters LLP climbs the ranking this year having continued to build out its practice with key hires. Counsel Ildar Bagautdinov joined from Reed Smith LLP in 2022 to add specialist expertise in structured trade and commodities finance. He worked with key partner Toby Grimstone to advise key client Glencore on its principal RCFs, which have a total value in excess of $6.5bn. Jeremy Gewirtz and Chris Staples  are co-heads of the firm’s global commodities group, and they each have extensive expertise in advising corporates, banks, funds and governments on commodities, trade and receivables financings. Gewirtz recently assisted Macquarie Bank Limited with  an SEK1,191,930,824 (approx. £97.6m) inventory monetisation for the Nynäshamn refinery in Sweden, which is owned by Nynas AB. A recent highlight for Staples was his work for Base Carbon Inc. on a structured tri- party carbon finance transaction.