Watson Farley Williams Asia Practice has advised Malaysian oil and gas services firm SapuraKencana Petroleum on the signing of its $2.3 billion Islamic loan with consortium of 11 lenders coordinated by Maybank, which was represented by Allen & Overy.
According to Reuters, the transaction, which will convert part of the company's conventional borrowing into a syariah-based facility, is Malaysia's largest ever.
The Islamic facility was structured as a multi-currency commodity murabaha facility and was used to refinance one tranche of the 2014 multi-currency facility, increasing the level of shariah-compliant financing taken out by SapuraKencana and making the company eligible to return to the Securities Commission's List of Shariah Compliant Securities.
SapuraKencana was omitted from the latest list of Malaysian syariah-compliant stocks as its conventional debt amounted to more than two-thirds of its total assets, Reuters added.
The WFWAP team was led by partner Andrew Nimmo, while the Allen & Overy team was led by Singapore partner Jason Humphreys, who was assisted by the firm’s London-based European head of Islamic finance, Atif Hanif.
