Julian Davies

Julian is widely recognised as a pre-eminent structured finance, regulatory finance and acquisition finance lawyer. He has developed many unique and innovative structures, including multi-source debt whole business securitisations and innovative project bond structures in the UK and Europe. He also works on structured swap transactions, deal-contingent swaps and swap restructurings. As well as traditional receivables and true sale securitisations he also specialises in monoline-wrapped transactions.

Julian founded the firm’s Structured Finance Group in 1997 (and led it for 12 years); heads the firm’s Project Bonds group; heads the firm’s Water Sector group; and founded and co-leads the firm’s Sports practice.

Work highlights

Julian has led on many of the market’s groundbreaking transactions. These include:

• Glas Cymru: on its £1.9bn whole business securitisation in 2001 that enabled the company to buy Welsh Water funded entirely through debt. The deal set the template for regulatory utility financings. It was ranked as one of the Top 40 deals over the past 40 years by the readership of IFR magazine
• Julian has been the lead partner on numerous completed project bonds. Julian led the UK’s first-ever project bond (Sutton Bridge); led the team on the market-changing Welsh Water whole business securitisation; structured the unique Network Rail not-for-dividend debt structure that now finances the UK rail network; advised on the Thames Tideway IP Provider structure; structured and drafted the first Sukuk Islamic finance project bond (Jubail); and completed the recent multi-source refinancing of Budapest Airport.
• on proposed whole business securitisations for Bayern Munich and Manchester United and match-day/season ticket securitisations for Everton and Newcastle United
• Ellevio (the second largest electricity distributor in Sweden): on the initial acquisition financing and then a multi-source common debt platform refinancing

External recognition includes being named second place in the Top 10 Financing Partners in EMEA by Mergerlinks for 2023, having advised on deals worth £18.45bn and being ranked in the Hall of Fame by Legal 500 UK 2024 for both Securitisation and Water and ranked Band 1 in Chambers UK 2024: Water.

Julian has spoken at numerous utility sector conferences on raising finance in the water sector. He has also sat on Ofwat’s Future Regulation Advisory Panel and led training at Rating Agencies.