Other Practice Areas

Other Practice Areas

Over time, our firm's list of other clients on international projects has been very extensive and involved major international corporations.

The firm's other areas of practice include international and domestic projects, construction and engineering projects, international trade and investment law, mergers and acquisitions and banking and finance.

As to our general corporate practice, our legal experience has involved extensive due diligence, corporate law analysis, negotiating and drafting of legal documentation, government approvals and corporate compliance advice. Our senior partner, Robin Chambers, has been a director of around 50 corporations in Australia and elsewhere and has acted as legal counsel over a long period of time advising the directors of corporations on the whole range of corporate law matters in Australia.

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Corporate Acquisitions and Reorganizations

Our lawyers have advised on takeovers and direct acquisitions in Australia and overseas. The legal input for all these projects involved extensive due diligence, corporate law analysis, negotiating and drafting of the legal documentation, government approvals and corporate compliance advice.

Some of the major investment activities included the following:

  • The proposed AUD1 billion acquisition of the Fontana steel plant in Southern California and other assets from Kaiser Steel. This involved a 12 month due diligence and negotiating process.

  • The proposed merger of Krupp Stahl, Klockner Werke and Hamersley into a AUD6 billion steel combine in Western Europe. This involved eight trips to West Germany over a two year period and included major due diligence investigations, negotiations with the EC and German authorities, corporate investigations and negotiating the documentation for all aspects of the merger.

  • The acquisition of the Benambra cooper project by Macquarie Resources Limited in Victoria.

  • The sale of Consolidated Press Holdings' coal project interests in New South Wales.

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Project and Corporate Financings

Project financing has been the accepted means of financing large scale mining projects in Australia. The projects in which our lawyers have been involved and which were project-financed included the following:

  • Hail Creek coking coal project;

  • Woodlawn lead/zinc project;

  • Tarong coal project;

  • Blair Athol coal project;

  • Argyle diamond project; and

  • Channar iron ore project.

All these projects involved the normal complexities of project financings taking into account the large borrowings involved and the nature of these investments.

Other client corporate borrowings have covered many of the financing techniques including syndicated loans, commercial paper issues, bank acceptances and interest rate swaps to name a few.

Overall, these financings involved some billions of dollars borrowed from US, Japanese, European and Australian banks.

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Anti-Trust Matters

The nature of our corporate and project involvement required the structuring of commercial operations to take into account US anti-trust law, EC competition law and Australian trade practices law.

Over time, our lawyers' involvement has included:

  • Representation as the lead Australian lawyer on the Westinghouse uranium anti-trust case (where Westinghouse had sued 29 corporations, including CRA, for damages totalling AUD7.5 billion). In the six month period of the settlement negotiations, Mr Chambers travelled 250,000 miles between London, New York, Canberra and Melbourne to negotiate the terms of settlement and to co-ordinate the roles of the Australian participants and the Australian Government in the settlement.

  • Representation in the zinc price-fixing cartel investigations and subsequent litigation brought by the EC. This involved the strategic planning of the defence in that case, the interlocutory Court proceedings and negotiations with the EC authorities during the four year history of the litigation.

  • Advised the Argyle diamond project on the anti-trust issues involved in that project's diamond sales contracts with the Central Selling Organization in London.

  • Advised on the Australian coal exports by Australian companies to Japan to deal with the avoidance of Trade Practices and US anti-trust problems with the pricing arrangements for the export of Australian coal regulated by the Australian Government.

  • Advised generally on the impact of the Australian Trade Practices Act on Australian transactions.

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