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Jared Grubb - Clifford Chance

Managing partner
5 points

New Zealand-native Jared Grubb specializes in cross-border finance, including debt restructuring, syndicated lending, acquisitions and project finance.

Grubb joined Clifford Chance’s Kyiv office in 2009 after working in Moscow. Being a relative newcomer to the country, colleagues say the benefits from using his fresh outlook on Ukraine to benefit of clients.

Many of his Ukrainian lawyer colleagues and expat old-timers tend to be overly pessimistic about Ukraine’s chances of rapidly reforming itself into a modern business friendly economy. Yet, in Grubb’s view, the country’s chances of winning or losing its battle with corruption are more or less equal.

“Ukraine is at the crossroads,” Grubb says. “It can either become a country in which the rule of law matters and provides protection and an even playing field for its citizens and investors or into a country riddled with bureaucracy and corruption without any rule of law and in which criminals can flourish.”

Until that crossroads is passed, Grubb is very excited about the quality and complexity of legal work that Ukraine has to offer, especially in loan restructuring.

Grubb recently advised the lending side in a debt restructuring situation where the borrower was one of Ukraine’s largest and most influential business conglomerates. The transaction involved nine jurisdictions, over 80 different facilities and 60 lenders, making it one of the most complex restructuring deals on the market.

Yet, not being content just with doing his job, no matter how exciting it may be, Grubb also feels that changing things for better in the country is also to a large extent up to the lawyers.

“The main challenge is to fight to create a system where there is a level playing field, where there is a rule of law which people can fall back on with confidence that their legitimate rights will be protected and where they will be free from tyranny,” says Grubb.