Law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP boosted its international energy transactions practice in early November by adding Greg Hammond to its London office as partner. Educated at the University of Cambridge, Hammond, 45, was a partner at White & Case LLP in London for 10 years.
In one of his biggest deals, Hammond represented TNK-BP, a joint venture between BP plc and Russian investor-owned Alfa Group, Access Industries Inc. and Renova Group, on the sale of Russian crude producer Udmurtneft OAO to Chinese company Sinopec in 2006 for $3.6 billion. He has also worked on nonenergy, cross-border deals, including advising private equity firm Castle Harlan Inc. when it sold United Malt Holdings Ltd. to Australia's GrainCorp Ltd. last month for $662 million.
But Hammond says Akin Gump's strength in energy attracted him. "It's a truly a recognized energy firm, whereas at White & Case it was less of a focus," he says. "It's not quite in their blood as it is at Akin Gump."
Hammond says the energy sector is quite active now compared with other industries. He's advising Norwegian oil services company Aibel AS on reorganizing its business operations and he's also representing several European utilities on buying an unnamed AIM-listed oil and gas exploration company in order to lessen their reliance on supplies from Russian oil companies and other big producers. The U.K.'s largest utility, Centrica plc, made a similarly motived move, buying Scottish oil and gas producer Venture Productions plc in August for £1.3 billion. In that deal, Hammond represented an entity that also hoped to buy Venture.
"They need good management teams and advisers to do" these deals, he says.
The supermajors are not interested in buying other companies any more, but are looking instead at hooking up with national oil companies in uncharted territories such as Libya, Hammond says. There's also quite a bit of interest in the U.K. portion of the North Sea, where "prices [are] viewed as good deals to buy," he adds.
As for private equity, Hammond says the major firms have been pretty quiet, but he thinks as oil prices stabilize and share prices come up, interest will pick up as well. "Private equity firms have large cash piles they need to invest or return to their investors," he says. "The minute the trend begins to build and the deals come back, we'll see a lot of activity. We're seeing a lot of people kicking the tires."
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