Ashley McDermott

'The outstanding Ashley McDermott is a dynamic lawyer who provides brilliant structuring advice.'

Legal 500 2023

Ash McDermott is a partner in our London office and was listed as a ‘Leading Individual’ by Legal 500 2023. His practice involves cross-border finance transactions, especially syndicated loans, and he has spent at least six months working in each of Hong Kong, Moscow and Tokyo (in addition to London) during his career. He enjoys closing complex transactions involving multiple parties, cultures and jurisdictions as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Ash has notable experience in relation to emerging markets, particularly export, trade and multilateral financings in the commodity, energy and infrastructure sectors. He advises agencies, banks and borrowers on a variety of trade and trade finance work, including borrowing base, prepayment and pre-export financing as well as receivables purchase transactions. He advises on inventory management and working capital solutions including the sale and purchase of inventory, consignment structures, factoring and commodity repos.

Ash’s experience extends to acquisition finance, funds finance, margin loans, investment grade and mezzanine lending. To name but a few examples, Ash has worked on sizeable loan deals in developed as well as developing markets (especially in CEEMEA and Asia) involving aircraft and airports, cruise ships and ports, family owned businesses, helicopters, hydroelectric power stations, listed securities, Macau casinos, media conglomerates, subsea interconnectors and African railways (track and rolling stock). He has significant experience in export and agency finance and has a particular interest in financings for sovereigns, state-owned enterprises and parastatals. As well as new money deals, he is often asked by his clients to assist in restructurings and workouts, especially in frontier markets.

In recent years, he has advised banks, export credit agencies and multilaterals on the eligibility of certain guarantee and insurance products as unfunded credit risk mitigation (CRM) under the Capital Requirements Regulation (CRR), together with the firm’s insurance and regulatory specialists. He also advises on a range of distribution methods, including insurance, secondary loan trading, participations, credit default swaps and other risk transfer agreements, together with the firm’s derivatives and structured products practice.

Ash held the pen on the LMA’s first ever recommended form of facility agreement for use in export finance transactions (the LMA working group for which consisted of around 10 banks, 10 law firms and 10 ECAs) and is a regular speaker at conferences. He has previously completed six month secondments at each of Goldman Sachs, HSBC and JPMorgan.

Ash is also a relationship partner for our pro bono client Shelter (the charity that campaigns to end homelessness and bad housing in England and Scotland).