It’s one thing to close a deal funding an $18 billion liquefied natural gas project–the biggest project financing ever. It’s another thing to do that deal in Papua New Guinea, one of the most remote locations on earth. And it’s another thing entirely to close the deal on a compressed schedule during the deepest economic collapse since the Great Depression. But that was the assignment Sullivan & Cromwell’s Frederic Rich and Latham & Watkins’s William Voge took on last year.
The PNG LNG project will extract natural gas from the ecologically sensitive Southern Highlands region of Papua New Guinea, pipe it 450 miles to the capital, Port Moresby, and liquefy it for shipment to markets throughout Asia and Oceania. Rich represented the sponsors, a group that included Exxon Mobil Corporation, Oil Search Limited, and Papua New Guinea’s government. Voge represented a group of six export credit agencies and 17 commercial banks in the $14 billion financing portion of the deal.
