About

Investment management platform Pillarstone works with European banks and businesses to manage their exposure to non-core and underperforming assets, helping them stabilise, grow and create value. The Pillarstone legal team is intentionally designed to be lean in order to reflect the overall flat structure of the organisation. ‘Leveraging years of extremely hard work, the legal department has evolved towards becoming a sounding board for the entire organisation and its individuals, advising on the full spectrum of corporate and personal issues facing a sophisticated platform such as Pillarstone and becoming a key point of contact for a variety of stakeholders. These include investors, partners, counterparties, portfolio companies and the legal and compliance teams in other countries where Pillarstone operates’, says general counsel Silvio Cavallo. The Pillarstone legal department has been involved in some of the most complex and sophisticated transactions in the Italian markets in the past few years. Due to the nature of the business platform, the legal team works on extremely diverse and specialised areas of law, including financial restructurings, corporate finance, M&A, general corporate law, regulatory, structured and leveraged finance and compliance. In April 2017, the Pillarstone platform successfully completed a complex restructuring transaction involving, Premuda, an Italian shipping company, which included a recapitalisation through a debt-to-equity swap and a first of its kind public to private transaction, as a result of which an ad-hoc acquisition vehicle became the sole shareholder of Premuda and a direct lending transaction from an Italian securitisation vehicle for an aggregate amount approximately equal to US$44m. Most recently, the legal team was involved in the financial restructuring of Manucor, a BOPP producer and Rainbow Magicland, a company operating an amusement park in the vicinity of Rome. ‘The legal team strives to combine technical expertise with a profound understanding of the business dynamics, so as to be a true value-added strategic partner of the investment team with an emphasis on risk management and fostering a culture of compliance within the firm’, says Cavallo.