About

Before joining the hotels industry, Richard M. Levine established his in-house credentials in the private equity sphere having started his in-house career as general counsel for Credit Suisse’s private equity division in New York, followed by a five year tenure as general counsel at Hellman & Friedman in San Francisco. Returning to New York in 2004, Levine was recruited as executive vice president of Kerzner International, which was then a public company that developed, owned and operated luxury hotel properties around the world, principally under the One&Only and Atlantis brands. On his time and achievements at the firm, he has the following to share: ‘Over the course of my eight years at Kerzner, we did a tremendous number of strategic transactions, including a “go-private” management buyout and subsequently a painful structuring. Through it all, I developed a fascination with being on the inside of a corporate organisation’. At Kerzner, Levine worked on the company’s management buyout, something he highlights as a career highlight: ‘A transaction that took a year from inception to completion with twists and turns [transaction-wise] and from a governance perspective as our MBO offer was topped by Apollo leading us and our co-investors to have to raise our bid in order to win the auction. I had never felt such a sense of collective accomplishment as all of us had been working ceaselessly for nine months to bring the various strands of the deal together, and for the founder and his son, it was a complete triumph in which we all shared. This MBO, more than any other project, taught me the strong bond that can get built between colleagues and the powerful incentives that such esprit de corps provides’. In 2012 Levine joined Belmond, a major operator of luxury hotels, train services and river cruises around the world, and is credited for facilitating some of the company’s most important deals ever since. He’s also recognised for transforming the legal department at Belmond to be much more responsive and commercial, in addition to providing more in the way of infrastructure to drive efficiencies, and compliance procedures and policies that are simple and custom-made for the company’s business.