You're reading: Top Lawyers: Serhiy Chorny

Serhiy Chorny - Baker & McKenzie

Managing partner
9 points

The list of major cases that Serhiy Chorny worked on during his 18-year career in Ukraine for Baker & McKenzie, one of the world’s top law firms and a major player in Ukraine, is nearly seven pages long.

He has been involved in a significant share of the whopping $8.5 billion worth of Ukraine-related deals that his law firm handled in the last decade, according to mergermarket.com data.

Heading the Banking, Finance and Capital Market department at Baker & McKenzie’s Kyiv office, Chorny works with banks and advises on international capital markets transactions, securities trade and cross-border leasing deals.

The list of Chorny’s Ukrainian clients includes most, if not all of the country’s most powerful industrial and financial groups. To name just a few, Chorny has advised Metinvest, the mining and steel company owned by richest Ukrainian Rinat Akhmetov on its $1 billion capital markets borrowing.

Chorny was also involved in the issue of $500 million worth of Eurobonds by PrivatBank, Ukraine’s largest bank owned by billionaires Ihor Kolomoisky and Gennadiy Bogolyubov.

Also among Chorny’s clients is Ferrexpo, an iron ore giant owned by billionaire Kostyantyn Zhevago that raised nearly $350 million through an initial public offering on the London Stock Exchange in 2007. It remains the largest initial public offering transaction done by a Ukrainian company.

It is all the more surprising that Chorny’s outlook on the legal environment in Ukraine is brutally frank.

In his opinion, all the confusions and contradictions found in the nation’s cumbersome legislation are not there by mistake. To the contrary, Chorny thinks they are imbedded by design to make any dispute dependent on the regulator’s decision rather than the law itself.

“One could say: why do you complain? Such legal mess creates an ocean of opportunities, as the lawyers become indispensible in helping the businesses out,” Chorny said.

“But better-quality laws would permit lawyers to concentrate on helping their clients with really complex cases, rather than to waste hundreds of hours and their clients’ money in struggles over a sensible interpretation of non-sensible normative texts.”