About

Bayerische Landesbank has had an eventful recent past. The initial plan developed by the Bavarian State Government had been to privatise the bank, however, this plan was abandoned as the EU Commission pushed for a restructuring solution as the way forward; the Commission’s state aid procedures completed in 2012. As legal counsel to BayernLB, Karl-Heinz Kronawitter has had to face a multitude of challenges, among them air carrier Aero Lloyd’s insolvency, one of the bank’s holding companies, a case that entailed ‘complex insolvency, tactical and strategic issues’. Kronawitter has also been instrumental in several domestic and foreign high-volume structured financings, PPP financings such as the Elbphilharmonie project in Hamburg, and high-volume real estate portfolio financings. One of his key goals apart from carrying out the day to day work is to ‘support less experienced colleagues so that they are able to deal with matters quickly, solution-oriented and deliver work that is of instant use to non-lawyers’. Key here in his view is to ‘determine commercial goals and translate them into legal and contractual terms’. External lawyers should ‘not only moderate but clearly express their views in negotiations, just as in-house counsel at times have to give recommendations while on partly unfamiliar terrain’.