The judges were struck by the complexity of Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton’s work advising BNP Paribas on its acquisition of Fortis’s Belgian operations.
There is a very good case for dubbing the transaction the most politically-charged of all the credit crunch-related deals. The Belgian Government’s decision to sell the debt-laden bank’s Belgian assets to BNP Paribas caused such a political storm that it brought down the Government. The resulting shareholder litigation almost sank the deal. It was the first case of a bank being rescued by the state and then being sold onto the private sector. The team was spearheaded by Paris-based partner Pierre-Yves Chabert and Brussels partner Jan Meyers.
