In its 20th year, this course will take place over three days in central Amsterdam (venue to be confirmed) on 28, 29 & 30 April 2020. This totally revised course has new content and will cover the following:

• Fully understand the impact of different lending rationales and the prospects of repayment
• Understand how structures came about, what they can achieve, and what they don’t do
• Horses for courses: deep dives into different structures, how they work, where they might best be applied, where they might be less reliable, and the variations on the central themes
• How ‘best practice’ comes from experience, and experience is generally learnt from bad practise
• How to assess term sheets and negotiate on facility documentation
  
• How to use insurance and other risk mitigants in the SCTF context
• Identify opportunity, while observing the “dos and don’ts” in both emerging and developed markets
• Understand the lessons of the global financial crisis, and the 2015-17 commodity price collapse – how did trade-related structures hold up?
• Full risk assessment : how do SCTF perform against other classes of creditor in modern restructurings of borrowers with multiple debt categories.
• Opportunity & Threat: Basel 2, 3 and 4, & the impact of the latest regulatory developments
• Learn to argue : beware the ‘wrong lessons’ from different cases

You can see the full brochure here

John MacNamara is CEO of Carshalton Commodities. For 20 years until 2019 he was global head of Structured Commodity Trade Finance at Deutsche Bank AG, first in Amsterdam and then in London, finishing as Vice Chairman Trade Finance, Commodities. He chaired DB’s ‘Commodity Trade Finance Council’ which was a technical review body of all DB’s commodity trade finance facilities, and was responsible for all commodity-backed financing across both Developed and Emerging Markets. Prior to setting up the multiple award-winning business at Deutsche, Mac set up the Structured Trade & Commodity Finance business at Santander in London, and has worked for international banks and commodity traders since 1982. His first structured deal was already in 1983, between the USSR and Colombia, financed by an Islamic commodity fund. Publications include the STCF chapter in the Loan Market Association (LMA)’s 2016 textbook ’20 Years in Loan Markets’ which includes product definitions for the main structures, also the PXF chapter in the LMA’s 2013 textbook ‘Developing Loan Markets’, also his own 2001 textbook ‘Structured Trade & Commodity Finance in Emerging Markets: What can go wrong?”, plus he contributed a large part of ‘Financiacion estructurada del comercio exterior’ – a guide written for the Spanish exporters’ institution ICEX. For the last 7 years he has been sitting on the LMA’s commodity finance working party, which produced the PXF template in 2013 and which recently has been working on a new template for BBF, also on the steering committee for UNCTAD’s Global Commodities Forum, also on the editorial advisory boards on ‘Global Trade Review’ (GTR) and ‘Trade & Forfaiting Review’.

In 2019 GTR conferred their first ever ‘Legend in Trade’ award on Mac, while TXF gave him an award ‘For Outstanding Services to Commodities Finance’. Mac has an MA from Cambridge University and a Green Beret from the Royal Marines Commandos.

DETAILED TOPICS:

• Course agenda Understanding what defines structured commodiity trade finance
• Background to the evolution of structured commodity trade finance
• Understanding where SCTF is now • What is SCTF in a modern context: what do we include in SCTF today? Traditional lending, asset-backed and credit enhancement approaches
• Traditional balance sheet lending
• Financing cash flows
• Other alternatives including asset-backed financing and credit enhancement
• Assessing term sheets
• Term sheet components
• Drafting requirements: information
• needed
• Documentation Legal risk issues
• Loan agreement documentation
• Documenting security
• Areas for negotiation
• Using effective structures
• Structures used in countertrade, tolling, emerging markets and
• prefinance
• Warehouse finance and inventory financing
• Using SPV’s Risk workshop: origin countries
• Analysing the potential for non-performance
• Commodity origin countries & pre-export finance
• Pre-export finance structures
• Collateral Management
• Risk mitigation: insurance
• Overview of country risks
• Expropriation, political risk and terrorism
• Basel III & regulatory issues
• Case studies Crisis lessons: learning from recent events, what are key criteria for a happy life in SCTF?
• Additional what-can-go-wrong case studies: nightmares in practice.... Brazilian softs sector prepagmentos: why do they still fail to live up to expectations? An analysis of prepagamento failures.
• Ferrous sector feedback: the “wave of waivers” and the restructurings recently in the Russian and CIS ferrous metals sector. The dangers and risks of Russian/former CIS business
• A fertiliser deal in Russia - how CIS softs continue to scare us and how to avoid pitfalls

You can see the full brochure here