About

New Zealand fishing company Sealord is one of the country’s best known seafood brands and one of the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. The scope that the two-man legal team cover has broadened in recent years to include risk and business planning as ‘the team gets involved on a wide range of matters’ according to general counsel and general manager corporate affairs, Tim Silverstone. They recently assisted Sealord on entering into a shipbuilding contract with a Norwegian shipyard for the construction of a $70m NZD deepwater fishing trawler. ‘The vessel will be the first newly built deepwater fishing vessel in the New Zealand fishing fleet for 20 years and so is a very significant event for not only Sealord, but for the New Zealand fishing industry more generally’, according to Silverstone. To fund the construction, financing arrangements were entered into with Norwegian organisations Eksportkreddit Norge and GIEK (Norwegian Guarantee Institute for Export Credits) as well as Mitsubishi UFJ Lease (Singapore) and The Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ. The team also worked on the sale of Sealord’s UK subsidiary, Sealord Caistor (now Caistor Seafoods). The sale was part of Sealord’s strategy to focus on operational performance, its vision to be the best deep sea fishing business in New Zealand and shows how well integrated the team is in terms of alignment to the business and understanding its strategy.