Clayton E. Parker, a Miami-based partner of K&L Gates, helped Miami-based mobile phone distributor Brightstar Corp. negotiate $1.87 billion of financing transactions last year under tight time constraints.
The biggest transaction was a $1.32 billion senior secured credit facility with 17 banks, which replaced a $600 million facility led by PNC Bank. The credit facility agreement with the 17 banks closed June 28, 2013. “We did this from start to finish in about six weeks,” Parker said.
In addition to the increased size of the credit facility, the challenges for Parker and his team at K&L Gates also included the appointment of Bank of America as co-administrative agent and co-collateral agent together with PNC, which had been the lead bank of Brightstar since 2004.
“A number of new banks came in because Bank of America is a participant in the facility,” Parker said. “It was a real challenge, because having two administrative agents is having two sets of rules and having two sets of committees to go through before you even go out and approach the committees of the other 15 remaining banks. So there was a lot of negotiation between PNC and Bank of America.”